On Wed, 2007-11-07 at 09:18 +1030, Tim wrote:
If you like the idea of a permanent address, never having to tell friends to contact you on a new one, etc., then register your own domain name, and pick any company that you like to host your mail (and any other services you want). And if they begin to suck, you can pick up your bat and ball and go somewhere else, and still use your own domain name and e-mail addresses.
It's well worth it, there's any number of hosting services that are reasonably priced. And, as their business is purely hosting, they can be a lot better at it than ISPs, many of whom just care about getting money off you to provide a connection to the internet.
What I currently do, is have my domain registered via godaddy.com with the dns pointing to dyndns.com.
At dyndns.com I have my domain name and aliases setup.
On my computer (or in this case, the server one), I have ddclient that runs and checks for an IP every so often and reports it to dyndns.com. And then I run a little program called dnsmasq to help resolve local machines to run without having to resolve all the time and being slow.
Then I just setup my server machine to accept emails, web, ftp, etc. And I run a linksys router between my cable modem and my computers.
Might not be the best way, but I basically pay per year for domain name and dyndns service, maybe $30/year or so, give or take a few. But it works and lets me keep on top of administering and not having to change my emails all the time.