Best way to have name servers and email serverice without a full-on hosting account?

[Frank Petronio]

I am switching my main hosting but have a few minor domain names that I've piggybacked onto my service for small projects, Blogger sites, friends and family - for years now. I rather not transfer all of them to a new host. Ideally would like my friends and the kids to take over control of their own domains, email, and name servers that point to their Blogger or Tumblr pages so I don't have to maintain or babysit anyone.

So for friend XYZ, who has his domain pointing to a Blogger page and has his name and mail servers as a subset of my hosting package - what's the best way to shake them free? They will want their domain going to their Blogger. And they want their email served using their domain name.

And most likely I'd have to set this up for them, because even though I don't know what to do very well, I still know 1000x more than they do....

[Eric Rose]

Set them up on siteground and let them use some of the templates there to create their own blogs and such. Or you could use one of the following services: http://freedns.afraid.org/ , or http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/

[patrickjames]

If you want to shake them loose then shake them loose. Give them the code and release the domain (assuming you are the one who registered it) and tell them to go to GoDaddy or whomever. If they are too cheap to spend 10 bucks a year for the registration (which is all they need) then they have problems that shouldn't be yours. All you will need to do is set the nameservers for them.

Personally, I keep my hosting and my registration separate. Nothing worse than being held hostage by a hosting company and having to threaten legal action before they will respond. Not to name names but I will because they sucked. Readyhosting wasn't very ready. I was with them for well over a decade too. I found the whole situation pitiful and it almost cost me one of my domains.

I use GoDaddy for registration now but I am not impressed in the least. Their email worked only sporadically for me but thankfully I have switched it all to my hosting company. StableHost for hosting. I recommend them if you are searching for someone new. Everything goes super smooth with them. Very impressed. No down time, email is instant, ftp is super fast, tons of space. Can't ask for much more than that.

[polyglot]

I would suggest using pairnic for your domain registration; they are the gold standard. Also pretty easy to point it to any other third-party hosting company, and there are plenty of places that will sell you an email-only service if you want that. Another really cheap option is email forwarding, i.e have the host just forward all your email to gmail or something and do no storage or IMAP, etc.

[r.e.]

Frank,

If I understand, you want to close down your current hosting service and get your friends/relatives to move their domains to hosting for pages and e-mail that is simple (no complex back end). They can do this by signing up for Google Apps, which has the added benefit of being free for personal use ($50/yr for businesses). This will give them Google Sites (to host pages, very easy to use) using their personal domain name, and Gmail, which can also be configured to a personal domain name. Someone who already has personal domain hosting for pages through, e.g. Tumblr, would just sign up for Google Apps to get e-mail at johndoe at johndoe.com. It appears that they can also use Google Apps for registration if they want ($10/yr), although the registration is handled by Google partners, not Google itself: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=53929

I gather that you already know this, but for those who don't, here is the procedure to use Tumblr to host a personal domain name: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/custom_domains I assume that the procedure for Blogger is similar.

[jp]

Google is a good option. The features are nice (particularly the calendar and the android phone integration), and the gmail web interface is very easy to use. Regular mail software can check gmail too.

As a host ourselves, we use tucow's OpenSRS system for many registration needs. Looks like tucow's hover.com has something that might fit the need too for end users.