Call me crazy, but I can’t imagine why so many business owners choose to host their own email. Try as i might, I can’t figure out a single economic benefit to a small organization hosting its own email. About six weeks ago, I set up email hosting for a small organization I started up. Rather than hosting in myself, I chose to let Google host it for me. So, I set up a Google Apps account, spent ten minutes setting everything up/verifying that I own the domain, pointed my MX records and…done.

Now, I don’t have to update my on mail server software, nor do I have to set up any backups – Google handles all of that for me. That leaves me a whole lot of extra time to deal with important things – like building cool products, attracting users, and learning from them.

Business is about allocating resources – I would rather allocate my resources to important people like my users than to administrative tasks on a mail server!

Those of you who followed my old blog no doubt remember how much I stressed over the Virtual Private Server (VPS) decision. I was caught in a place where my various sites were eating up too much power to stick with a shared host, but I had never hosted my sites on a VPS and wasn’t sure what provider to go with. After much thought, I went with my instincts and chose Linode.

Roughly three months later and I have never been happier. Not only are all of my sites fast, but I love having the control that a VPS offers. The Linode Control Panel is extremely easy to use – I can restart, rebuild, resize or clone my servers quickly and easily. As far as statistics go, in roughly 90 days of service, I have been down once, for about ten minutes. That downtime resulted in my one and only support experience with Linode – the support experience was excellent and I had a great time working with their rep.

(keep reading…)