I’ve been trying to decide what to do with my online presence after graduation for a while now. I had a few choices about what I could do once my MIT hosting disappeared:
- I could give it up and suddenly not be online.
- I could use generic services like GMail and Blogger to maintain a basic web profile.
- I could host my own server either with a dynamic DNS entry or with a static IP address and dedicated hostname.
None of these were quite right enough for me because I want to be online with a distinctive, cohesive website on which I have a lot of room to experiment, but I also want the 99.9% uptime guarantee for essential services that places like GMail provide. Therefore, I really don’t want to just not be online anymore; generic services don’t allow room to experiment, nor do they provide a cohesive web presence; and frankly, I’ll probably be messing around with my server too much to provide any sort of uptime guarantee.
After a little bit of research, I decided to go with a free Google Apps account with a personal domain name ($10/year). This is nice, because Google Apps provides all the functionality of the Google suite – GMail, Calendar, Docs, etc., but with the personal domain name, I can also set it up so that some subdomains point at my own server. This provides a coherent interface to the outside world. You can see what I mean if you go to http://blog.mpdaugherty.com and you end up on http://daugherty.mit.edu.
On the other hand, my email address (which I’m not going to type here because of spammers) is also @mpdaugherty.com, but when I check it, the interface is basically the same as GMail; this is so much more convenient than trying to set up my own mail server and make sure everything continually works correctly.
My only disappointment is that the web pages part of Google Apps is very limited. You cannot just upload html files arbitrarily; at least for your homepage, you must use their WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. I already have a fine website design; why can’t I use it? Luckily, this won’t be a problem in the Fall, once I get my server set up and redirect http://www.mpdaugherty.com/ there. For the summer, however, I may have to just live with the pre-designed Google webpage templates.
