Large Web Host Urges Customers to Use Gmail

1sockchuck writes "LA hosting company DreamHost, which hosts more than 700,000 web sites, is encouraging its customers to use Google's Gmail for their e-mail, rather than the DreamHost mail servers. DreamHost is continuing to support all its existing e-mail offerings, but said in a blog post that email is "just not something people are looking for from us, and it's something the big free email providers like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google can do better." DreamHost addresses a question about Google that has vexed many web hosting companies: is Google a useful partner, or a competitor that intends to make "traditional" web hosting companies obsolete? In this case, partnering with Google offers DreamHost a way to offload many of its trouble tickets, reducing the support overhead. Is Google starting to make web hosts less necessary?"

Webmail

[Lord Lode (1290856)]

For me non-webmail is a thing of the past, I love being able to easily access my mail from any computer anywhere (and I'm on quite a lot of different ones on different places). And GMail is the best of all webmails, so they sure made a good choice!

Not just webmail

[Midnight Thunder (17205)]

For me non-webmail is a thing of the past, I love being able to easily access my mail from any computer anywhere (and I'm on quite a lot of different ones on different places). And GMail is the best of all webmails, so they sure made a good choice!

For those who want a bit more than simply webmail, there is also the SMTP and IMAP interfaces offered by GMail.

Re:Webmail

[Ngarrang (1023425)]

Use the correct tool for the job. Google makes for a wonderful mail host. You can still have your [e-mail] address through their mail servers while gaining access to their superior spam-filtering and fantastic uptime.

There will always be a need for web hosters, though a different niche may need to be found. For example, not ever host offers PHP, or Python, or fill-in-name-of-technology and that is where the hosters can differentiate themselves from the free providers like Google, geocities.

From previous experience, e-mail seems to be the red-headed step-child in the service package that a web host offers.

Re:

[xSauronx (608805)]

to be fair throwing putty and your keys on a usb key *isnt* that big of a deal. but i really dont want to do email browsing in a cli, thanks.

Re:Webmail

[ShieldW0lf (601553)]

For me, GMail equals unprofessional. It equals Mom and Pop.

It means you can't even afford to run your own mail server or have someone do it for you.

It means not knowing if the person I'm dealing with is really associated with the domain or the business in question.

It means that my communications are being scanned by a third party, and that I should self-censor accordingly.

It just doesn't reflect well on a person to use GMail for business, in my opinion, and would make me seriously question the credibility of the business.

Re:Webmail

[mweather (1089505)]

For me, GMail equals unprofessional. It equals Mom and Pop. It means you can't even afford to run your own mail server or have someone do it for you. It means not knowing if the person I'm dealing with is really associated with the domain or the business in question.

Last I checked, you could pay for Gmail and use your own domain name.

Re:Webmail

[by Anonymous Coward]

For me, GMail equals unprofessional. It equals Mom and Pop...

Last I checked, you could pay for Gmail and use your own domain name.

Actually it's free for your own domain for the same services as a generic gmail account. You only need to pay for it if you want 24/7 phone support and an obscene amount of HDD space. I host a few dozen websites for clients. I've converted most of them over to gmail using their own domain names. I can even remove the gmail logo so it isn't obvious they're using gmail.

Re:Webmail

[by Anonymous Coward]

My company has 3 domains that are set up with google apps. Obviously, all of our mail goes directly to [e-mail]. Google provides the mail servers and a web based interface, as well as calendar, chat and a couple other collaboration tools that all stay neatly contained in our domain. We also moved our customer management system off site to a server running SugarCRM, for those of you who know what that is.

Now, this is where things start to get interesting. Our ISP, E-LEVEN, got into a spat with its backbone provider, Belgacom. Belgacom cut them off, and we were left without internet in the office for over a week. May is a very bad time for this to happen: we sell summer travel and May is the month where we make most of our sales. Thanks to Google Apps, we didn't miss a beat. We just forwarded the phone lines to employees' home phones and sent everybody home to work. Employees communicated with google chat, customers experienced no lag in their response times and we were literally saved. Since our customer DB was off-site and web-based as well, it was a completely transparent transition.

We got our lines back in the office and went back to work in the office for obvious managerial/supervision reasons, but that week was the most the productive we have had in years.

Anybody who doesn't think google apps is an excellent solution for small business either doesn't have any idea how small business work or doesn't know how google apps works.

Re:Webmail

[tgd (2822)]

Last I checked the six domains I have sitting on GMail, you can use your own domain name for free.

Re:Webmail

[jsight (8987)]

Last time _I_ checked, you could NOT pay for Gmail and use your own domain name.

The the last time you checked was a really long time ago. :)

Re:Webmail

[PerfectlyNormal (1280804)]

And if you're not a DreamHost-customer, you can *still* use GMail with your domain name for no extra charge (meaning, free). Isn't the world just amazing?

Re:Webmail

[thePowerOfGrayskull (905905)]

gmail doesn't reveal that it is being used - you still manage [e-mail]; it's not forwarded. I suppose if you inspect full email headers you'll find a google mail server handling the message, but the vast majority of people don't bother.

Still, it's a valid point that people should be considering - when you start using gmail for your business, you're giving them permission to mine your business data.

Re:Webmail

[thePowerOfGrayskull (905905)]

Far more importantly, where [google.com] does it say that you do not [epic.org]?

Re:Webmail

[jafuser (112236)]

It means that my communications are being scanned by a third party, and that I should self-censor accordingly.

If your mail passes through the USA, this is unavoidable.

Re:

[peragrin (659227)]

Not to be mean but the Post Office loses and routes mail wrong on a regular basis. My Grandmother once sent me a birthday card. It arrived 3 weeks after my birthday. I figured she had forgotten since it only normally takes 2-3 days to send a regular card.

Then i looked at the date the post office stamps the envelope with when it goes out to cross off the stamp. It was dated 3 days before my birthday.

so had the card with decent handwriting and the correct address(yes I double checked) on it been sent regu

Re:Webmail

[ibmjones (52133)]

It means that my communications are being scanned by a third party, and that I should self-censor accordingly.

Most email are sent plain-text, so it doesn't take much effort to scan the contents. That is why you use PGP. :)

Re:Webmail

[HughsOnFirst (174255)]

My accountant has been sending encrypted PDFs of my tax returns to me in gmail for at least 3 years

Re:

[grassy_knoll (412409)]

Think you're right.

From his description, he's ending up with a .zip file which contains encrypted files. Any mail system which blocks attachments by file name and blocks .zip files would remove the attachment and / or block the mail.

When I tested it, I ended up with a .zip.gpg file. That made it through fine.

Re:Webmail

[dk.r*nger (460754)]

It means you can't even afford to run your own mail server or have someone do it for you.

Yeah, or that I know that my business is not running emailservers, and my time is better spend doing other stuff...

This might matter in the "we run Exchange-server because we're ENTERPRISE and important"-segment, but in the "getting shit done" segment, GMail is very very very good value for money ($0 or $50/user/year for the ENTERPRISE-woo-we're-important-plan).

Oh, and you do know that you can use your own domain on GMail, completely transparently, right?

Re:

[mark_hill97 (897586)]

They already do that, and its quite easy to set up. You just have to set the mx records and place a file in the root of the server to authenticate that you are the one controlling the server

Re:Webmail

[phrenq (38736)]

While GMail may be unacceptable for business communications in a company of 100+ employees

Why? I work for Google, so I'm not entirely impartial, but we use Gmail here with well over 10k employees, and it is by far the best corporate email experience I've had. I'm on several high-volume mailing lists which I have permanently archived and can search through immediately.

With Google Apps, nobody knows your domain is using Gmail, so there's no appearance of unprofessionalism to external companies.

For most large companies, email is not their main focus. It's just a distraction, something they need in order to do their real business. I'd think that offloading that headache would be a relief.

Re:

[statemachine (840641)]

I work for Google, so I'm not entirely impartial, but we use Gmail here with well over 10k employees, and it is by far the best corporate email experience I've had.

The problem with your argument is that Gmail is internal to and controlled by Google. Many other businesses may have a problem with using a third-party email service which scans the email for advertising purposes (no privacy) and permanently stores all emails (no forward liability protection). All of which is then subject to the business' ISP's d

Re:

[Knara (9377)]

As as a fellow dreamhost user, I noticed recently that they started integrating Google Apps into the hosting management area of the control panel. Might be useful as an alternative to Squirrel Mail (which I also think is klunky, but I use it as IMAP usually, so almost never am actually in that interface).

STREWTH

[Kamineko (851857)]

Strewth! I use Dreamhost for my hosting, and their uptime is a bit pants. (There's many websites dedicated to how terrible DH is. Many, many websites.)

This announcement just makes them seem wonderfully credible, don't you think?

Are there any good, big hosts located in the UK?

Re:

[WK2 (1072560)]

I'm really happy with nearlyfreespeech.net. It's not in the UK, though.

Re:

[telbij (465356)]

(There's many websites dedicated to how terrible DH is. Many, many websites.)

The vast majority of which are written by ignorant script kiddies who think that for $10/month they should be allowed to utilize unlimited resources and slow down the server for everyone else on it. So they make a big stink about it publicly then go to some other shared host where they inevitably make life miserable for 50 other customers on whatever server they get assigned to (I've been on the receiving end of this and it's not

I just prefer...

[cayenne8 (626475)]

I just prefer to set up and run my own email server from home.

That way, I can handle spam they way I want, set up accounts for friends if need be (or businesses)

At the very least..."I" know who is storing and reading my mail. Me, not some corporation that holds it, reads it to display ads....and turns it over to the govt. at the govt's whim.

Re:I just prefer...

[jeiler (1106393)]

You can stop the storage company from turning things over to the govt by removing the company from the equation ... but how do you stop the transiting ISPs from turning things over?

Re:

[mortonda (5175)]

Transiting ISPS would have to snif traffic to catch my email, which is doable but a large task. My email server also has TLS available, and a lot of sites actually do use it... which makes it unsniffable.

Re:

[Nursie (632944)]

Use encryption opportunistically, that helps, any comms between known hosts in your web of trust are then impenetrable to anyone but you.

We switched to gmail.

[jellomizer (103300)]

My company switched to useing gmail. Primarly because it is too expensive to keep our mail server running smoothly. The mail server is one of the most volnerable parts on your network, Linux/Unix or not it is a huge security risk. And it needs to be kept up todate constently, Reconfigured spam filters... For a company mail server is very expensive. And if gmail is willing to do this for Free even though we get adds, we end up with a better email service for less costs. We switched and we are getting less Spam, out internet connection speed is better (slightly). And we are getting mail more relabably.
The employees can check their mail remotly. Management is happy they are not getting killed with Spam, and the office can be left uninteded and locked up for Weeks.

Re:We switched to gmail.

[Snocone (158524)]

For your sake, I hope your company doesn't have any trade secrets.

For your sake, I hope you're not stupid enough to think that your company's trade secrets are safe in email that doesn't go through gmail...

I'm a Dreamhost customer

[jalefkowit (101585)]

... and if they require me to pipe my mail through Google, I'll take my business somewhere that doesn't.

First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[NetSettler (460623)]

partnering with Google offers DreamHost a way to offload many of its trouble tickets, reducing the support overhead. Is Google starting to make web hosts less necessary?

One of the things I don't like about free software is that it basically pays for itself off the profits of an unrelated industry, eliminating competition in an otherwise viable industry because someone can afford to offer the service for free as a loss leader to other business.

A thing that is especially troublesome is that not only does it basically make it so that no one can afford to be in the business area (software development for money) competing with the free thing (software given away for nothing), but also no one can afford not to use the free thing because the cost of the luxury of buying an alternative brand will be exposed by the market as superfluous if passed along to end users.

It seems to me that if this becomes a trend, it will be the effective continuation of that paradigm shift by Google into another area, and that the logical continuation of this, by analogy, would be that not only can no one afford to compete with Google and other agencies giving away free mail but no one will be able to afford not to use Google's mail.

That would be sad if it turns out that there are reasons why using Google's mail is not a good idea... such as, for example, concerns about privacy.

If Google becomes the standard of mail, the problem is that it can afford to add incidental services in parity with any nuisance it causes, making it impossible for would-be competitors to match on a value-point by value-point basis even if they find a way that should theoretically be able to compete.

Re:First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[homer_s (799572)]

...eliminating competition in an otherwise viable industry because someone can afford to offer the service for free as a loss leader to other business.

You should read Bastiat's petition [bastiat.org] to block out the sun.
You are leaving out the benefits to the end user due to the cheap/free software. It is the classic "Seen vs Unseen".(Of course, if your point about "profiting off an unrelated industry" is true, then it is theft and hence wrong. But I don't believe that that is true.)

but also no one can afford not to use the free thing because the cost of the luxury of buying an alternative brand will be exposed by the market as superfluous if passed along to end users.

Yes. That is a feature, not a bug.
Either the alternative brand has some value, which end users will pay for or its value is not worth anything and the end users are not willing to pay for it.

The mistake you are making is that you value competition for its own sake. Competition (and producers) exist only for the sake of the end consumer. If the consumer can obtain what he wants for a low cost or for free, then there is no need for competition or producers.
This is also the mistake people make when they argue against free-trade and monopolies.

Re:

[homer_s (799572)]

You cite two faults of the free market system and I'll try to answer each one.

It is possible to badly assign dollar values to things and in so doing to create situations in which competition will kill things of value as, for example, it might be argued is occurring with things like global warming, where a competitive market is seeking various earth-unfriendly situations because the dollar value of having a world that continues to function correctly has not been appropriately assigned.

The term is 'neg

it's all about the SPAM...

[timjones (78467)]

I'm a very small webhost provider (< 20 domains), and for me, it was a no brainer to get all my customers to get GMail for Domains, point all their MX records to Google, and wash my hands of the SPAM. I use it for all my personal domains as well. Google does a far better job of SPAM filtering than I ever could with SpamAssassin and the blacklists thing... and for this small set of users (< 50 people total), it just wasn't worth it. My tech life got a lot easier when I decided I wasn't going to mess with email anymore, just like the day I decided I was going to ignore Microsoft's APIs. Both are losing propositions in the extreme. So, for me, Google is a VERY useful partner. And I like their web/chat interface too, both the browser version and the mobile edition, which I access from my Treo 650.

Dreamhost is incorrect.

[snarfies (115214)]

1) I have run websites for three different local anime clubs over the years. In all cases I wanted a webhost that had pre-installed mailing list software (mailman preferred, but I'd go for whatever). A lot of webhosts may or may not offer mailing lists, they don't specify - that also means they lose, do not want.

2) I said this before in a largely-unrelated story, but I'll say it again here because its relevant: I own otakubell.com, and its primary purpose (nowadays) is email. Its my server, its my domain (registered through an independent registrar, not tied to the hosting). I don't have to worry about Yahoo or Google suffering a security breach. I don't have to worry about them mining my email for advertising data. And I certainly have a hell of a lot less spam (my Yahoo email account gets HUNDREDS of spam messages every week). If the webhost screws up, I can point my domain elsewhere (hit upon routhost a few years ago, have been quite satisfied). You, on the other hand, are stuck if Google or Yahoo screw up.

Playing with fire

[AppyPappy (64817)]

I set up my wife with a free email account which she used for sending emails to Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts, etc. After a few years, they canceled her account for spamming. I thought I would never hear the end of that. She still brings it up.

If you have a free account, don't expect a whole pile of customer support. If they decide to cancel some VP's account, it just sucks to be you.

Gmail - a natural extension of Postini

[zerofoo (262795)]

A few comments seem to suggest that using gmail for your business is "unprofessional".

Gmail can host email for your domain. You manage your domain, Gmail hosts your mail - most people will not realize that your email is kept at Gmail's servers.

This product grew out of the Postini merger. Many, many companies use Postini for "front-end" email security and filtering. Your domain's MX records point to Postini's mail servers. Postini receives your mail, scans it, filters it, and then delivers it to your mail servers. I've used Postini's service in the past, and it is an awesome service.

The only difference with Gmail is that the mail now is not forwarded to your mail server, it is kept at Gmail.

Unprofessional? Hardly.

-ted

Said it before

[Colin Smith (2679)]

Google is the start of the factrification of the IT sector, they are the new Arkwrights.

It's basically an IT factory, providing the same service to hundreds of millions. Where smaller scale and family businesses might have performed those particular services before. Have a look at what happened during the Industrial Revolution for an example of what's coming. I'm sure there will even be some new age Luddites protesting against the changes.

It's simply the economics of increasing availabilty of bandwidth.

 

Re:Very unprofessional move

[HansF (700676)]

Using google apps for your domain [google.com] enables you to use your [e-mail]... they just take your mx record and handle your mail.

Re:

[joelstobart (1238490)]

They have released a limited trial of application hosting. Only python at the moment - its called the Google App Engine [blogspot.com] and its like a free (for limited use) version of Amazon's EC2 Cloud.

Very professional move

[Vellmont (569020)]

The idea that I'm going to be content putting "[e-mail]" on my business card instead is laughable.

Who said anything about gmail.com? Google also provides DOMAIN based hosting of your email. i.e. [e-mail] can go to Google's servers.

If Dreamhost doesn't want to include email with their web hosting accounts (and it looks like this is the first step towards phasing it out), then they need to get out of the web hosting business

I very much disagree. Web hosting and email hosting have very little to do with each other. They both involve the internet, but beyond that, there's little crossover. Why not let each provider provide what they can do best? I don't eat at gas stations, even though driving across country often involves feeding myself as well as my car. Why should my website host try to also provide poor email?

Re:Very unprofessional move

[MaxInBxl (961814)]

Well you can simply configure your host to forward your "[e-mail]" mails to "[e-mail]" automatically. It is then trivial to set Gmail up so that incoming mails sent to "[e-mail]" are replied with "[e-mail]" as a reply-to address.

I use this for several of my domains. The clear advantage for me is that I can use the Gmail interface which I've known and used for years now. Every hosting provider has their own brew of online mail and I've yet to find one that can compete with Gmail.

This is starting to sound like a fan boy post, but another sizable advantage of using Gmail (or hotmail or yahoo-mail etc.) is that your current ISP probably does not have global coverage. So when you move to France next year and have to use neuf.fr as your provider your old e-mail address and messages will not follow you. However you can check your hotmail / Gmail / yahoo for free, no matter where you live and no matter who your ISP is.

However, on a professional front, I personally don't think it is a good move for the simple reason that people hang on to ISPs despite better competition only because they've been "using the same [IS provided]e-mail for years now".

Just my 2 cents

Re:

[DerekLyons (302214)]

They [Dreamhost] obviously don't have the kind of professionalism that it takes to run a web hosting company (as further evidenced by making glib comments referring to "studly CEO's" in an official blog).

(Chuckle.) I love it when a Slashdot stereotype shatters... I mean, usually the complaint is that most companies are bland and sterile soul sucking Dilbertesque hells... And here we have a complaint because a company isn't!

Now, obviously not everyone is going to be happy with a given company - so

Re:Very unprofessional move

[mrboyd (1211932)]

No one is asking you to use the gmail.com domain for your professional emails.

Google App is a free mail hosting for companies domain (up to 100 email) using their gmail technology. And yes you can replace the gmail logo with your company logo and choose your favorite colors.

I recently decided to get rid of our internally hosted and managed email server to use google free services and as a part time sysadmin I am delighted. It hassle free. Took all of five minutes to set-up including sending an email to my ISP asking them to redirect our MX server.

It gives our employees POP, IMAP and a state of the art Web access and it runs on a distributed server farm with 99.99999% reliability. My boss is paying $0 for it and is very happy about that.

I didn't even bother looking into the other features but apparently we also have our own company branded google calendar, google chat, google docs and google sites.

There currently isn't any interesting "Google App Engine" based application but from the look of the admin dashboard it seems that I will be able to add the one I like to my domain. If the Google App Engine picks up that will mean free company branded - server farm hosted - applications like forum, image gallery and even maybe CRM application...

An small to medium sized company would be really stupid not to take advantage of that kind of offer and dreamhost advice is actually making sense. Want to host your own PHP pages? use DreamHost. Want a professionally run email server? Go see google/hotmail/yahoo.

From a business standpoint it makes a lot of sense. Running an email server is a much more complicated matter than stacking a few servers together and providing AC, UPS, fire extinguisher and fat pipes. I am pretty sure it provides them and their customers with little added value for the cost of running it. Especially with the current barely manageable spam levels.

Re:

[afabbro (33948)]

DreamHost is not phasing out email...and having been a customer for nearly 3 years, I can report they are indeed one of the most professional web-hosting companies. Non-stuffiness != non-professional.

Re:

[Binary Boy (2407)]

Totally agree - Dreamhost has been the most responsive and responsible vendor I've ever used in shared hosting projects - meaning less than a few hundred bucks per month, no one has come close to them in my experience. Of course, I've not tried every hosting provider out there, but against those I have, Dreamhost is tops.

It's just a bonus that you have a pretty geeky, almost confessional CEO who sends out some fairly amusing newsletters - they certainly provide much better communications about exactly what

Re:

[Knara (9377)]

Yeah, by and large I like Dreamhost (except they need a more robust VPS offering). Their shared hosting is priced just right as far as I'm concerned.

Most of the complaints I see about DH are from wankers trying to run a 24/7/365 uptime business on shared hosting. They're amateurs that are trying to get by without paying for an SLA, and then get pissed when their shared hosting has unexpected downtime.

Aside from those wankers, most DH users (myself included) seem quite happy.