If you want to use Google’s services such as Gmail, Calendar, and Docs on the backend of your website and to design your task management routine, Google Apps make that possible. Google apps are now available with Google’s website hosting services in a wide variety of packages targeted at a variety of business types: Standard Edition (free for individuals and non-affiliated groups), Premier Edition (for businesses),Non-Profit Edition, Education Edition, and Government Edition. Here are four tips for buying a website domain with Google Apps.
Google Apps Are Free Without the Domain Name
Google has been in the website services business for quite some time through its Google Apps that can be integrated into a website. Lifehacker mentions a number of features that have long been central to the success of Google Apps: “Basically you get all the goodness of Gmail et al. (storage, spam handing, etc.) with total portability, and if you’re a domain administrator, you can easily manage and create other people’s accounts, too. At the price of free, that’s a pretty sweet deal for small businesses and organizations, especially considering that most web hosts charge for extra email addresses and that kind of storage space.”
You don’t need to sign up for hosting through Google in order to use their apps. In fact, Google Apps have been free for quite some time, but the link has been hard to find.
Google Apps Offers Competitive Hosting Prices
If you do want to check out Google’s Apps and website hosting packages, the rates are quite competitive in comparison with the leading website hosting services. When you consider that you can integrate Google’s familiar Apps into your website management, hosting with Google’s $10 per year fee for most hosting plans (though it will vary in some cases) starts to look pretty good. According to Google, their hosting plan includes the following:
· “30 day free trial of Google Apps for Business pre-configured for your domain
· Full DNS control and management
· Private registration to protect your personal information
· Google Apps for Business: Google Apps for Business is a suite of online tools that includes custom email (@your_domain.com), calendar, documents and more.”
In addition, with Google as your host and as the manager of your productivity and collaboration applications, you can easily integrate a variety of services into your website for little to no cost:
· “Mobile access: manage your business from anywhere with access on all your web-enabled devices
· Easy collaboration: work virtually with employees, contractors, or partners in other locations by sharing online docs and editing them together, in real-time
· No hardware or software required: get started quickly with nothing to download or install
· Tons of storage: get plenty of space for all your emails and Google-powered search to find them instantly.”
Google’s Domains Are Diverse
Country-based domains through Google are especially competitive, making Google’s offerings attractive to small international businesses. Amitt of Digital Inspirations offers the following examples: “You can now buy country-specific domains (like .in, .org, .in and even .cc) through Google Apps and the deal could be better than buying directly through the registrar. For instance, Google offers the India specific .in domain for $8 per year while GoDaddy charges $17/year for the same TLD while Indian registrars charge around $10 for .in domains.”
However, if you would like a .net, .org, or .co website domain that uses the Google Apps Business Edition, the free version does not offer any of those domain listings. While Amitt of Digital Inspirations has found a workaround for this that lets you keep the free Google Apps for business domains, the cost for Google Apps for a business starts at $5 per month, per user, which most small businesses should be able to afford.
Google Apps Are Easy to Use with Google Domains
One of the advantages to using Google Apps besides the competitive price is that you can access a wide variety of standard website management features that are extremely easy to use. For example, Gina Trapani writes at LifeHacker, “If you own multiple varieties of your domain name—for instance, multiple top-level domains like example.com, example.org, and example.net—you can map those to a single Google Apps account using domain aliases.”
This ease of use is one of the common themes that writers share about hosting a website through Google: the Apps make hosting a website a breeze. That familiarity with Google’s programs paired with a low price make Google domains an attractive option for many business.
This post was written by Lior Levin who is a consultant to a shopping cart abandonment startup and who also work with a psd to html shop.