Making the Switch
I have finally decided to take the plunge and have signed up for Google Apps to host my corporate mail. This is not something that I expected to do, and until know had been taking the ‘cheapskate’ route and running my mail through an existing hosting account that I have for other domains (including this blog).
Having used Gmail since I wrangled an invite from a friend working in Silicon Valley when it first launched, I have been an instant fan. The unlimited storage coupled with the search feature just blew me away (although now I am on a Mac, OS X search rocks).
I must say that I am just as impressed with the corporate version of Gmail thus far. My migration was simple and
There are a few reasons that I made the switch:
- Additional Backup- having my email stored both locally and in the cloud is yet another safeguard for me. Since having kids and accumulating massive amounts of digital photos and video, backup has become an extremely important issue for me. Knowing how easily things can get lost, stolen or fried (we had a power surge in the house but our data survived- the plasma TV didn’t), I use both local and off-site backup through Carbonite.
- Reliability- although there have been some well publicised outages recently, I am much more confident in Google’s ability to scale and manage storage than my current hosting provider.
- Storage- not having to worry about how much email I accumulate over the years on my personal account has meant that I just don’t delete things. I just archive it and then it is there whenever I need it. When writing this post I actually went back to my very first email ever sent in Gmail quickly and easily.
Time will tell how things go, but so far so good.
