Slightly after the nick of time

[kingandy]

So, it looks like stsquad has pulled the plug on his webmail; that or he's having a temporary unintentional outage. Either way it has motivated me to finally get off my arse^[1] and think about what I'm going to do when Bennee.com goes down For The Forseeable Future.

Bennée has been hosting my (largely disused) website and serving my (vastly more essential) email for a good 2-3 years now, as well as operating a nameserver for both those features. Web space is easy enough to come by; if all else fails I can switch back to Compsoc by one means or another. Ditto mail - I'm planning to attempt some sort of sleight-of-electrickery that will result in my andysdrawings.co.uk mail proceeding directly to a Gmail account, or some such. No, the sticking point is the nameserver.

We do a bit of nameservery at work - and I will probably ask around there at some point - but I don't want to be beholden to a place of employment and I strongly suspect we have a limited number of domains (or even pay per domain). What I really want here is a friend who runs their own NS, or failing that, advice on what commercial DNS is reliable and cheap. The one we use at work is www.zoneedit.com, which seems pretty good, and looks like it might be free for a single (<200MB p/a) domain. (I don't think my domain can be particularly high-traffic, unless I were to start hosting my webcomic there.)

So, anyway ... that's what lies in front of me. Any ideas?

[1] Actually thinking doesn't involve the arse, does it? Nor does writing about it on an internet journal. So I suppose I am still technically arse-bound.

Comments

[spodula.livejournal.com]

Did you not have a DNS option with whoever your domain registrar is?

For songofsteel.org.uk and salkin.co.uk, i use the the one provided by 1and1. (Its all covered by the £5 per two years, along with email forwarding et al)

I'm sure most do.

[ed-fortune.livejournal.com]

Clara.net is arse. Avoid.

123reg is ok.

[spodula.livejournal.com]

Having read the post a bit more. If your just looking for a place to put your web stuff, you can add to my growing collection of other people's websites and point your domain at that. I run Apache2+PHP+perl+mysql on Debian.

However, its not unlikely you will have the same issue in a few years time, although I have no immediate plans to move.

Webmail is a different problem, as I have been meaning to properly sort out my email for years. I have been meaning to swap the whole lot into another server for ages, but still need to buy that server. Hmm, perhaps now is the time.

[anne-l-davies.livejournal.com]

Webmail was working earlier today, but it isn't now. Have you tried asking him about this?

[anne-l-davies.livejournal.com]

Never mind - as we're both now aware, he's been migrating the server

[kingandy]

And without notification, too (aside from vague hand-waving about "before January" at a party). Tupping liberty! I demand my money back.

It's funny because I've been getting this "bennee.com mailing list subscriptions" message every month, come rain or shine, and the first time there's something that actually warrants a message to such a list, the cable's just yanked out without so much as a hows-your-father.

[anne-l-davies.livejournal.com]

It seems that Virgin have chosen this EXACT point in time to screw up horribly.

Although I do wonder if the access address may have changed and we haven't been told? I did ask for a week's notice so that I could migrate everything.....

[stsquad.livejournal.com]

The email is still running fine. I didn't touch that. I did however forget that people use www.bennee.com to access it. However I have provided a special webmail alias for now.

[paulgregory.livejournal.com]

I believe it's easier to pay a few quid a month and have a commercial web host handling everything - DNS, email and web. I can't see that you're doing anything fancy or have any need to switch hosts faster than a locomotive so I don't see the need for third-party DNS.

I do recommend to set Gmail to collect from a basic mailbox rather than have the data forwarded through the interwebs a second time. The IMAP on Gmail is a godsend; switch language to US if you've not got the option on UK English yet.

(The web dev company I work for resells basic, medium and high-end hosting from a number of suppliers and has set up custom NS in a number of different ways but it's not where we make our money nor what we want to be responsible for.)

[kingandy]

Ah, apparently not only is my domain up for renewal in February, but the company I registered it with has been acquired by Mythic Beasts, who apparently do include DNS with their £7+VAT two-yearly reg fee. I shall probably stick with them, because I like their name. Their actual hosting appears to be of a professional quality, however, so I shall probably look into alternatives there. I don't know, is £50 a year a lot for a shell account? It seems it, but that may be because I've been getting that for free.

I vaguely recall that Black Cat offered this also, but Chez expressed a preference for hosting it himself for some reason. Possible dynamic DNS changes or some similar. I could be mistaken on this point.

[stsquad.livejournal.com]

I've been considering Gmail hosting for email but I'm still undecided. I've tested it with alexandfliss.com and I'm currently hosting all my developer email there.

[masati.livejournal.com]

I do recommend to set Gmail to collect from a basic mailbox rather than have the data forwarded through the interwebs a second time

Why? The data is still being transfered a second time, just using a different protocol which requires you to furnish Google with an additional username and password and hostname that you are associated with.

I can't even see any advantage to the handling of DSNs.

[kingandy]

"I do recommend to set Gmail to collect from a basic mailbox rather than have the data forwarded through the interwebs a second time"

How about pointing the MX record directly to Google? No forwarding, no external web sites, just Gmail.

Google Apps: I think I'm going to like it.

[masati.livejournal.com]

I'm using 123-reg for my domain registration and DNS, and (currently) have a Virtual Server in the states (I wanted a bit more control over sites and config. than "upload the stuff using this FTP address) because it was the cheaper option.

My mail I'm currently forwarding to Gmail (the VS isn't big enough to hold a decent archive). I've turned on IMAP, but have surprised myself by not using it.