My biggest concern was that I wanted to access my Email using the combination of Exchange 2007 & Outlook. While I like the control of hosting the email, I certainly don't have the headaches and worries of keeping the server patched, online and services running all the time. It became a real pain in the neck some weeks. The server would be working great for 3 months, then all the sudden, something would crap out or a patch would cause a reboot and some services wouldn't start. Then, there were the occasional DSL outages at my house, even on a business line that I had no control over. Luckily, no mail was lost during that time as I was using DynDNS to hold/forward my email to the server.

So now, I can access my email anywhere and it's hosted by Google. I hate to say that any company really has it figured out, but Google really has it figured out. If you're familiar with Gmail, you know how easy it is to use. With a lot of the new upgrades in the past 1-2 years, accessing your messsages is more secure; notice I said "accessing," not storage. I know they have their complex backend storage of email and it's "supposedly" secure from others, but I'm still very skeptical of having my personal email on a publicly accessible system.

Even with all that, I'm willing to accept the risk. They also offer Google Docs, Calendar & Sites if you want to use them. It makes it nice if I'm at an Internet cafe or something and I need to read a document fast. I'm getting an iPhone here in Germany, so I'm hoping to sync it up with my Google Apps too.

Lastly, I had to move the website that you're reading now. I've had multiple domain names that I've supported over the years and I ended up on MyDomain.com as my Registrar. So, I have a small Linux hosting package that works great if I just want to quickly put a website or something up. Well, "quickly" may not be the right word, but it works. I've found that during the process of migrating to this hosting service, their access times for their shared servers is quite slow. Nonetheless, it works for this blog and our website.

One thing I can say is that compared to working on my Windows Server 2008 Server w/ IIS 7, installing Movable Type for the website was breeze on MyDomain hosting. They had every required piece of software installed without a problem (MySQL 5, PHP, CGI, etc). I can't tell you how many hours I put in to making Movable Type work on my IIS Webserver! And then, once I got it working, 2 days later, it would start throwing errors... I wanted to pull my hair out; if it doesn't fall out earlier.

So, all-in-all, I'm satisfied with how the migrations went. I now have abruzere.com services up and running for those family members that chose to use it.