No doubt I’m sure a lot of you are aware of this bandwidth exceeded evil mockery of a page. It’s honestly been awhile since I’ve stumbled across a page that had a 503 page on it, due to the large amounts of bandwidth that most hosts now have with their packages. Anyway, after viewing Bubs’ page and seeing that her bandwidth limit exceeded, I realized that the e-mail I was writing to her, wouldn’t get to her until she A.) Paid for more bandwidth to last her until the a new month, B.) Waited until May started to renew the bandwidth. This was because she was using her domain+hosting to receive/send out mail (at least, I’m assuming so.)
Even though I can control my own bandwidth, I have my e-mail accounts hosted off of my server. I currently use the Google Apps service for mail. There are two editions for the Apps: Standard Edition which is free, and Premier Edition which is $50/year. If you want to check out what the difference is, you can view their comparison. I currently have the standard edition, since I don’t utilize what the Premier offers.
With Google Apps, you can create your own e-mail “service” that will utilize GMail’s interface if you chose the webmail route, or you can use POP3 accounts which utilize’s Gmails POP and SMTP ports. Setting it up is very easy to do. When you go through the steps of signing up, it will provide you with two ways to authorize that you own the domain name being used. Once you have that domain name verified, you can set up your e-mail accounts through the interface (you can reach yours by http://google.com/hosted/atourworst.org. Once you have your accounts set up to your liking, you will need to log into your domain’s control panel (cpanel, dhpanel, ensim, et al.) and change your MX Entries to reflect ones provided by Google (you don’t/won’t need to use all of these, you can pick one):
- aspmx.l.google.com.
- alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
- alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
- aspmx2.googlemail.com.
- aspmx3.googlemail.com.
- aspmx4.googlemail.com.
- aspmx5.googlemail.com.
So, even if your website has exceeded bandwidth, or hell, your server is down, you’ll still be able to send and receive e-mails. The reason why I also like this is because of GMail’s spam box that will rid of all the junk, so I won’t have to worry about receiving hundreds of crap e-mails. I don’t use the webmail feature often, since I prefer POP3, but if I’m out and about (say at Mark’s place) I’ll just log into my GH account and check mail through there.
Here are some images of Google Hosted’s admin panel:
I sort of ran through this without really going in depth about the service, but you can check out the links I provided above to try to get a better idea of what else is included with the service. If you’ve got any questions, feel free to ask about them. I’ve been using GH for about a year and some change now, so I’d like to think I’m somewhat knowledgable on the topic!
Grr, it’s so aggravating. I told my host that I’d upgrade my bandwidth today as long as I could get my site back right away, but I’ve yet to hear back from them 😛
My email is still working, though… weird.
good tip. i currently have my mail forwarded to my gmail account.. i wonder if that counts againsy my bandwidth..!
@Bubs — tell them to hurry up. People are in dire need to be on your site stalking it 😉
@Jack — E-mail usage is still included with bandwidth; If you have it forwarding, it still has to go to your mail server, and then to GMail. Might want to look into GH since you’re already using gmail 🙂
I’ve been thinking about switching my domains over to Gmail, but when I went through the app form one of the questions shied me away, I think… I don’t remember which one; now that I’m looking at it again I don’t see anything scary.
AAANYWAY… I’ve just signed up one of my domains for it.. Let’s see how this goes!
I’ve contacted them… three times! I even marked the ticket as urgent. I’ve been with my host for almost 4 years now, but I’m beginning to get fed up…
Bubs you’re using Netrillium, right? I just left them in January because they took forever to respond to tickets and just lost the friendliness they used to have…I was with them for a while too, 5+yrs. =/
But interesting about the Google thing, I was checking that out the other day…I may be convinced to switch now. 😀 Wooo!
I use my secondary email at Gmail. I’m not really fond of checking through my site or something like that..perhaps the email add like admin@domain.com or something like that. Lol.
But that Gmail forwarding sounds neat and awesome.
However, I feel and I can say the same way as what Jess just said about knowing about it before and saw something that made me shy away. Lol. Yea, but now that I look at it, I am like: “o.O what about it that I saw before?!”…Lmao.
But anyway, yeah. I’ll try that…maybe. Lol. I’m just too lazy right now and..I’m happy without the forward thing and using gmail.com directly..xD perhaps in the near future, yea? Lol.
503 error happens because video bandwidth has increased dramatically
That sounds like a neat idea to have GMail host the emails, but I suppose it would be more beneficial for sites that use quite a bit of bandwidth. Still good to know though! I’ll pass it along to my friends.
I did a movie for the launch showing how to set up Google Apps in 60 seconds that you might be interested in: http://youtube.com/watch?v=QhLyiuDKNrU