we can rebuild him, we have the technology

basic introduction

If you are a small company doing business in South Africa, you will most likely be used to paying ridiculous and ever increasing amounts of money for just about everything. From diesel (the new petrol) to power your fossil fuel abusing German urban wagon, to your promised ADSL connection due for installation next week - touch wood.

In fact we have become so used to things becoming more expensive every so often, that paying R10 for a Castle is now considered a bargain?

After finishing your one Castle and not tipping the bar lady, you realize that your ISP is charging you R400 per year, just like that - for your domain name. And most likely in the region of R20 per mailbox per month. How did things come to this you may ask yourself? You really want another Castle but cannot afford it. It is only the 19th now remember? Payday is on the 25th.

Ok, most people will in fact not have only one Castle, but many Castles (or one Peroni if you stay in Joburg North). And most people will not worry about their ISP bills after leaving the bar. I do however. Then again, I worry about a lot of things after leaving a bar.

Now for years we have had to live with a curse in South Africa. A curse of having to pay through our teeth for everything. We had to be happy with the table scraps from the liberated consumer dinner party. The time has come to go freaken wifi with our destinies and break this mentality. Embrace the cloud.

Over the next few weeks, I will post a few tutorials on how to get the basics setup to get your company online. I will focus firstly on setting up co.za* domains and hosting your own DNS using EveryDNS. After that is done, it will be time to setup email, using the awesome Google Apps hosted mail platform. Later on I will quickly touch Weebly and Synthasite.

Not going the traditional route and skipping the middle man ISP, may sound daunting to someone with limited IT skills. But as David Heinemeier Hansson says, it is not f#####g rocket surgery. Doing it yourself will give you full control over everything (in a non scary way!), it will save you money and you will learn some cool stuff along the way.

As an example, registering your own co.za domain, hosting the DNS with EveryDNS, setting up unlimited email accounts on Google Apps and building a free website on Weebly, will cost you R50 per year. Thats it. Only R50 a year for domain renewal. Easy huh?

I will also be migrating about 25 existing client domains over to Google Apps/Office Live in the very near future. If you are an existing company looking into moving your mail over, I will post as much about the process as possible and info deemed usefull, including guides.

* Why co.za domains for now? After doing the email hosting thing for a while and working with a lot of small SA companies, co.za still remains the best domain option of choice if your core audience is South African. People tend to assume SA companies are mostly company.co.za.