google app on your own domain - 30 Dec 2010
If you love google and want to get more of their services, here is a post about hosting your web app [blog,personal page,company's page, full blown website] on their appengine cloud service, keeping email for your domain users with gmail and get the docs, calendar, picasa web albums and the other services included.
ok, time to start.
you buy the domain name me.com.
you can buy from your preferred registrar, or you can buy it from google too [godaddy.com powered] here: https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new. next steps:
- go to http://www.google.com/a
- choose the menu Solutions -> Google Apps (Free) or the other plans
- on the next page, there is a button on the right: "Get Started". Click.
- Enter your domain name: me.com
- a big form comes up, with name, email phone etc... fill it up.
- next we get a new form with username and password. fill it up.
- now we login into our domain at google
- an agreement. you agree.
- a verification screen. you must choose between 2 ways of telling google that you indeed own the domain. i go for CNAME record
- make a new CNAME record to point to google.com. done.
- and we are in big part done with letting google provide services under our domain. for specific services , of course there are additional steps to follow.
email. i want to login into http://www.google.com/a/me.com [you can change that to http://mail.me.com] and have my users check user@me.com email. you get google spam filters and 7.5 GB of space and gmail interface for free.
In the dashboard panel, we have at the bottom some links to the services provided. click "Email".
- on the page presented the important thing is "Email Activation" click: "Instructions on how to activate Email"
- next, choose "Change MX Records".
- and you change them in the DNS Manager - i am not providing advice on this one as it depends on your registrar, or if you host it yourself, depends on your name server daemon configuration files.
- after you are done, click: "I have completed these steps".
- test your setup now. send email to your me.com address, and reply to it. if it doesn't work, you should wait a few more hours in order for the DNS changes to propagate.
now, you want to have a website for your domain, and google appengine cloud solution seems like a good deal? read on.
- go to https://appengine.google.com and after login, you will see a button: "Create application". Hit it.
- name the application, and hit "Create application".
- good. now go to "dashboard" on the page presented.
- on the left we have a menu, go to "Administration -> Application Settings".
- there is a section there: Domain Setup, click the button: "Add domain...".
- on the next page enter the domain: me.com
- you will be presented with a login page of the me.com administration page.
- accept the agreement and click "Activate this service"
- "Add new URL" for the application. enter www.me.com
- create a new CNAME in your DNS Manager for www to point to ghs.google.com.
- hit "I've completed these steps"
- now make your website, and upload it in the appengine cloud.
you are done.
of course there are more things to check out : sites service looks interesting too which is now scriptable in javascript and you can play with docs in the website, but it is enough for my needs right now.