Chester Frazier's Blog

Ever since I started Definition Systems in 2008, we have used Server Intellect as our server company. At that time, we only had to use 1 virtual host which was fairly cheap at $99 per month, but we quickly out grew the one virtual server so we moved to a dedicated server which was $250 per month and we shortly out grew that server, you see where this is going right? Before I move forward, I’d just like to say that the support staff at Server Intellect is excellent, this article is not geared towards them at all. However, with that being said, the price scale at Server Intellect is unsustainable for a rapidly growing company.

I have been looking around on and off for a new hosting company for the past year but was disappointed when I found out that Server Intellect is very competitive with other providers. I actually stumbled upon Amazon EC2 by accident, I was looking around for a cloud backup service and I found Amazon S3. In looking at S3, I found EC2 and decided to try it out, to be honest I was skepticle to say the least but I was pleasantly surprised. I was able to get a “instance” setup in 3 hours to host our web apps.

Now, it took me a week or so to transfer all of our configurations and files but I did and we are now fully on Amazon EC2! We now have the equivalent server hardware we had at Server Intellect for $250 for a mere $60! I’ve also always preferred to host on Linux but Server Intellect only supports Windows servers so by moving to EC2 we were able to transfer over to Linux servers. The only reason I would suggest keeping Server Intellect is their support staff but if thats not a priority for you I’d say “What are you waiting for!”

A few months ago I reached the conclusion that Smartermail just wasn’t working for us, nor our clients, mostly because it was sluggish and the version we were running didn’t have good mobile support. Granted, the new version of Smartermail does have better support but we didn’t feel like spending a few hundred dollars for the upgrade. What we did for a while was brought up a virtual machine and ran Kerio’s Mail Server on it but that didn’t last very long just because the way we had it set up was such a hassle.

So, in looking for a new server, we wanted something open source we could port to Linux down the road but we came up with nothing with the features we were looking for. While getting frustrated, something began to dawn on me, I love my Gmail account. Back when we had Smartermail, I forwarded all my work emails to Gmail and setup a filter for it so why not just use Google Apps for our email domain? I looked at all of the features and it supported the main features we were looking for: cheap (even better, free), mobile support, calendaring, global address books, etc. I decided to go for it and within a hour and a half, we were migrated over.

Here, almost 2 months later, we are continued to be very pleased with the service, so pleased that we have now migrated all of our clients over to Google Apps and they seem to enjoy it as well. One of the features that I have come to love is Google Talk. Several times a week while we are working on a client’s system or drafting a proposal for them, we get stuck sending emails back and forth as soon as we receive them working out particulars and its so much easier clicking on their name and chatting with them back and forth.

We think that the free version is just fine for us since the ads don’t bother us too much but if we do ever spring for premiere version it will be because of the single sign on service so we can integrate our login credentials from other systems or their API but for now we think standard is just fine and highly recommend it!