Google Apps For .Me and Your Businesses – How To Set It Up
If there’s one thing Google is good at, it’s email. Ever since April 1st 2004, Gmail has been setting standards and raising the bar for other webmail services. Now, eight years later, Gmail is still the number one, while others are keeping up. After Gmail, Google introduced some other tools that every office needs – Docs, Spreadsheet, Presenter… and named all of them – Google Apps.
As a Google user, you can use all of those great services for free with your @gmail.com login. However, many of you own a personal domain name, like – yourfamilyname.me, right? In most cases, you’d have to use webmail application on your server or set up an email client on your computer; Outlook comes to mind. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could use your domain name with Google? Could Gmail be a webmail application for your .Me domain name?
It’s Time To Go Google
You’re in luck – you can use Google Apps with your own .Me domain name – and quite easily! There will be some technicalities, but we’ll guide you though them. First of all, you need to know how big your team or a family is. You can have up to 10 users on a free Google Apps account, along with 10 GB of email inbox space and 5 GB of Drive storage space.
If you need more inbox space or you have more than 10 users, it will cost you 5$/user/month. Additionally, you’ll get customer support and be able to disable Gmail ads. And for even more features like advanced security and e-discovery featuers you’ll have to contact sales directly.
So, lets set up your personal account.
The Setup
Head over to Google Apps homepage and click Start Free Trial. Fill out some basic info and click Next. Now, if you already own a domain name which will be used with this Google Apps account, select the first option; otherwise you can register a domain name with Google for $8/year. Google Apps has added .Me as a registration option when you open a new account. You can currently register 27 different top level domains with Google Apps, and .Me is available for 15 USD.
Now choose your username and password. Your email address shouldn’t be the same as any other personal email account – Google will check it for you. Once you click Next, your Google Apps account will be available and you’ll be taken to a dashboard where you can set everything up. And that’s pretty much it – simple, right?
One last step is the verification process – Google wants to confirm that you are the actual owner of the domain name. You’ll have to download a special, unique HTML verification file, prepared specially for you. Upload that file to the root of your domain name – which means you’ll have to have some server space. Once uploaded, visit a link provided in your Google Apps account to verify the upload after which you’ll have to click the Verify button to verify your domain ownership. Google suggests to leave the file on the server even after the verification process.
So, will you set up Google Apps for your team?
