There has already been a long debate about hosting your own DNS servers and mail servers but I’ve found once again relying on Godaddy total DNS management and using GoDaddy e-mail forwarding has made my three migrations over the last year a breeze. So I suggest to everyone:
Suggestion One:
Don’t mix your host and your registrar. You might not see your domain again.
For anyone looking to create their own site I urge you, never register your domain with your host. There are too many hosts out there that are priced well and say they have great service but when you find yourself needing to move the domain that they registered for you will tie you down.
This is probably the only suggestion I can give to the majority since the next two are more for the VPS or dedicated server owners.
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Since I have such an elaberate setup for email:
The iPhone allows for makes setting up e-mail so easy for a normal GMail account, even Google Apps accounts work through the basic “GMail” setup but there are a few problems:
One problem just creates the other for me, since I could always just use pop for the GA account the reply to would be setup correctly but I would be getting too much e-mail–including a double of my work e-mail–(since I have IMAP setup for work on another account on the iPhone) so a filter is necessary.
Also a lot of people might want to change that “From:” address if using one of the other methods of e-mail accounts on the iPhone.
Filtering:
From/Reply-to change:
On the iPhone create an “other” e-mail account, the type will be POP3.
Settings>Mail>Add Account>Other
Choose “Pop” out of IMAP, POP and Exchange buttons.
For the “Account Information” give your real “Name” and for your “Address” give the FROM address you really want to use. The key here is that you can now specify a FROM “Address” which is NOT defaulted to your Yahoo!, GMail or AIM account.
One of the first things I did on my Media Tempe (dv) was install webmin because I’m a huge fan of easy it let’s you manage your web/server, e.g. web interface to quickly change config files or restart particular services without having to login through SSH.
A more official description:
Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. Webmin removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files like /etc/passwd, and lets you manage a system from the console or remotely.
Add the following section to /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo
[dag]
name=Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
Install GPG key/signature by running
# rpm –import http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
Run
# yum install webmin
Your webmin should now be available at
http://your.ip.address:10000/
or
https://your.ip.address:10000/
and you can login using your root account.
I would highly recommend the stressfree theme for webmin, it makes it much easier to navigate. Also, Virtualmin is a must if you manage a lot of domains, it “supports the creation and management of Apache virtual hosts, BIND DNS domains, MySQL databases, and mailboxes and aliases with Sendmail or Postfix”.
I might as well complete my planned post about Google apps since a conversation is about to start.
I’ve been in the transition of using Google Apps for the last few weeks for a trial review. Next week I’ll need to decide whether to keep my apps account or stick with the free apps that 
I’m so dependent on. Since the my reasoning for using Google apps is solely based on my use of e-mail and the guaranteed uptime and support I can’t say anything more about the additional features that I plan to never use (start page, talk, etc.).
Although I do use Google Calendar and having that provided uptime is a major plus.
The problems I have with moving to Google apps is the limitation of taking my already existing gmail account. It wasn’t a problem importing my years of email into the new account through gmails provided pop support nor is it a problem emailing in the new account as @gmail, the problem is being dependent on e-mail forwarding with my @gmail.com. I’m not positive but I’m imagining if gmail is not allowing me to login it’s not forwarding my email, then the uptime means nothing.
The only solution is to transition an email change which fully makes sense because I wont be dependent on a service long term. Of course I like having @gmail rather than dan@[anyone of my domains I decide] and not having to tell everyone to update my e-mail more than I distrust Google’s future. I’ll go on record that I still do not feel locked-in but things would be different if I wasn’t so dependent on @gmail.
So for $50 a year isn’t unreasonable to me it’s having to change my e-mail or changing my Talk account. I use Talk daily especially at work where I talk to developers continuesly and I refer to my chat history a lot. It being an excellent BlackBerry app also helps. And chat history is something I can’t forward to my new account so I would have to login to my gmail to retrieve it.
For my Calendar and docs I just exported and imported them without a problem. however I did have to setup the sharing again with Sara since we both manage each others cal.
Only if Google allowed a gmail upgrade service or the integration between a Google app and Google account because that’s really what’s making me hesitant. Its a shame for them since the money isn’t an issue. I can’t guarantee any uptime like that for $4 a month and e-mail is too critical to grovel at. My issues are e-mail forwarding dependency (or having to chang my e-mail address) and not having the gmail history integration for Talk.
It makes me curious why Google Apps doesn’t allow for current gmail upgrades. Are the two services that different that they just couldn’t migrate my account? After my recent GMail outage I signed up for the free beta lasting until the end of this month and noticed all I could do was create an account with a domain. I used scatteredmedia.com and then added my gmail account so it will import all of the e-mails through POP, it’s still downloading them in 200 message chunks. So I could essentially still use my original gmail account by using POP and the send as function built in but I’d loose my address book, calendar and chat history. The chat history and IM change was the deal breaker, I use the chat history a lot since that’s my preferred IM.
After posting this on Twitter:
Whoever is recommending dotster for hosting and domains please stop. Sorry, but if you’re not ignorant you’re an idiot.
Jared asked, “What’s wrong with Dotster?”. LOL, I had forgotten he uses it.
I was requested to setup a client’s outlook to receive email from one of his many domains he purchased through Dotster today and I anticipated it to take a few minutes since he already had a server/hosted plan. Nope, it took forever and I found out a lot of crappy things about Dotster.
First thing I noticed, you can’t add additional domains to your server plan. I’m not sure how they could get away with this so I contacted “live” tech support and after a quick “hello, how can I help you” I never received a reply and I waited 20 minutes since I was looking through documentation and the control panel. Maybe it was the plan that he purchased but any hosting plan limited to one domain is inexcusable.
I just gave up on the hosted plan and looked into the domain configurations. Turns out they love the idea of upselling the customer.
Additional POP and SMTP is $12/yr.
I’m a GoDaddy fan. And after seeing this I’m a bigger fan because the second, third, fourth, fifth and seventh options are all free. I was amazed to see that domain forwarding was an extra charge as well as e-mail forwarding. I’m unclear with transfer locking since it says free / $10 and I thought domain locking was required by ICANN.
I ended with the gmail solutions Setting up the client with e-mail forwarding to gmail where POP access is free and has a bunch of other spectacular features that I rather not list here but I will say it’s the best solution I’ve found for managing e-mail from your own domains. That way he can have webmail access, archiving and use personal email accounts without worry.
So that’s why I have a beef with dotster. Their confusing admin panel, limited hosting plan and extremely expensive domain registration is amusing to say the least.
aside:
Outside of the the average user perspective, like todays client; DNS management is a big plus for me with GoDaddy (it’s free BTW). I had originally started using it because I didn’t have BIND setup on my own VPS when I moved all my sites so I instead opted for the “quick and easy”. I intended to get BIND up and running but soon after I realized having GD manage DNS is ideal. Not only do I have all the controls I need but it gives the extra redundancy if my VPS crashes and I need to point to another IP. There most likely are some limitations but after 9 months I haven’t found any.
I was just accepted for the GoDaddy affiliate program and you’ll notice an ad below for everyone to see. If you want domains GoDaddy is the best so I have no obligations to whore my blog out to them, I’ve had no problems with them and I’ve got tons of domains registered through them. Just make … Read More »
December 18
I can’t believe this. Media Temple has really let me down in their performance and customer service. I had to call them in order for them to put my ticket in some kind of priority to be fixed, unless it was just a coincidence that 5 minutes after I called we’re back up.
They’re complaining/responding that it’s a wp issue,
It looks like the problem was your object cache.
…domains/dancameron.org/html/wp-content/cache/wp_object_cache.lock
You had over 40 php scripts on each node of the cluster running and attempting to get a lock on that file.
But they later say it’s an issue with NTFS which I’m on, sounds to me like their issue.
As you can tell I’m a little pissed and I’m going to be looking into some Virtual Servers. Any recommendations? I might go with GoDaddy since they’re so cheap. But will a VM solve issues like this? I know I could just fix it myself but how would I know?
ARggg.
My new VM of Win MCE is great except one little problem it won’t connect to microsoft.com. Probably one of the strangest things. Any other site comes up but not any ms domain (not even a ping is returned). And it’s a full legit copy through MSDN.
Oh yeah, I’d normally not care :D, but I’d really like to run those … Read More »
September 07
