trying to save hosting money.help please

tabath

Hi

I have my own domain which I use mainly for email. I have just renewed it and am in ther process of transferring it to another registrar which is cheaper. I am also going to cancel the hosting plan as ui don't really need a website. However I do still need to receive email addressed to this domain.

At the moment I use tlaktalk as an an isp.
Am I right in thinking I need to put the address of nameservers in the whois record for this domain? If so are there any nameservers/free email hosting I can use for this purpose. Is there an article anywhere on doing this for free I can read?

Thanks in advance for any help!:j

LeeSouthEast

Have you considered using Google Apps? It's free, providing you can host the domain DNS somewhere (your registrar may provide this), or alternatively look at ZoneEdit for free DNS hosting. All you'll need to do is set their nameservers up at your registrar.

I used to host my own email but eventually farmed it out to Google. So much less hassle, and it works great.

If you did want to set up a web site down the line, packages at various places on the intertubes start at about £3/year and escalate upwards from there. You could also consider going dedicated from around £11/mo (PM me if you want to go this route at some stage, refer-a-friend program with my current provider could be beneficial to us both).

tabath

Thanks for the reply Lee. I was on a hosting package previously with dreamhost when I was playing around with website design. Unfortunately I can no long afford that but still need the email( I have had my own domainfor a number of years now so it would be really inconvenient to lose it). I will check out zone edit and see if it will do the job. Thanks again

LeeSouthEast

ZoneEdit + Google Apps = free and fast email. Paid DNS services (personally I use SecuritySpace) offer more resilience and someone to shout at when things go wrong, but ZoneEdit has been extremely reliable for a lot of my friends over the years. Google is Google. Never lost an email yet, but as you may know gmail falls over occasionally causing you not to be able to read your mail for a few hours a year. For free, I tollerate that !

If you get stuck, ask away. I'll be out of the country for 2 weeks as of 4am tomorrow morning though, but I'm sure others will jump in.

tabath

I might be being a bit thick here so please forgive, having had a quick look at google apps it looks like there is a$50 per year charge? Are you sure it is free?

Ahhh I see , the standard edition is free. Will try and and read up and see where i get now!

LeeSouthEast

The Standard Edition is free as you discovered.

jamalfatty

I was using an MS Exchange account for my mailboxes for ages but recently moved all my domains to Google Apps as couldnt really justify the cost of exchange. Was dead simple to move them all over, also used ZoneEdit which was painless, and best of all, it's all free!

tabath

Well I'm getting there. I've setup the admin and user accounts in google apps for my domain. I've used zoneedit as the dns nameserver and done a whois on my domain which shows the zonnedit servers listed as domain servers. I can send emails from my accounts but can't receive emails to. What have I overlooked. One thing springs to mind is that I am partway through changing my registrar for my domain - from dreamhost to godaddy.

Any help please?

jamalfatty

How long ago did you make the changes on ZoneEdit? It can take a few days for the changes to be propagated fully so would give it at least that amount of time before investigating further

tabath

Oh , I'll leave it a few more days then , it was only yesterday(wed today) that I altered the dns at zoneedit.

Thanks

LeeSouthEast

Have you set the MX servers up OK with ZoneEdit and validated the domain with Google?

I can do some digging if you like, just PM the domain name.