Google Apps Is For Regular People Too

There has been a good deal of talk about Google Apps being for business, how much money it can save companies over other enterprise email solutions. All of these facts are true however, don’t forget about the regular people. Regular people as in the casual and power Internet users such as your neighbors down the street, your family, friends and yourself.
Owning a domain is more affordable than ever before, less than $10 per year from many registrars. If you don’t own a domain yet head over to a domain registrar and lay claim to your own little corner of cyberspace. You don’t need to worry about web hosting with free and low cost services such as Google Apps, Blogger, Tumblr or Wordpress. There are many great services out there and some great uses that depend nothing more than some basic DNS changes. Read my post Making The Most Of Your Domain for some relatively simple yet extremely useful ways to get the most from your domain.

Friends and families might consider sharing a single domain by making use of sub-domains. For example the Williams family, Bob, Joan, Peter and Teresa, choose williamsonline.com and they all want to have email and individual websites. Bob might have bob.williamsonline.com, Joan  joan.williamsonline.com and so on. Each person can have an email address name @ williamsonline.com. All of this is no different than a business, if you can think of a family or group of friends as a business in this regard. Bob can point his domain to blogger, Joan to Tumblr or any other place they chose.

Choosing to going with Premier edition of Google Apps is another option for those that choose better support and tools. By choosing Premier edition of Google Apps among other tools is Postini powerful anti-spam tool but it also serves as archive for email for 90 days and longer. Even if you don’t need these advanced options the increase from 7GB to 25GB per mailbox is huge.  Google Apps makes it easy for groups even as small as a family to share calendars or documents. Working in the cloud has its advantages when it comes to family members sharing computers. No longer can the kids delete your important documents by accident or PC virus infection. If the hard drive crashes email, documents, and calendars aren’t lost. Working in the cloud also means no one is tied to one particular computer. The kids can work on homework from the library, school or a friend’s house without the need for flash drives. Thanks to Google Gears and offline support for Gmail, Calendar and Docs working offline is no longer a problem. Google Gears creates a copy of the cloud to your computer enabling complete offline access–giving you the best of both worlds.