For several years I have used a combination of paid services (Dreamhost, MobileMe, and Mythic Beasts) to host my online presence. Specifically:
- Blog (Wordpress on Dreamhost)
- Email (Dreamhost, then MobileMe with forwarding from Dreamhost)
- File hosting (Dreamhost)
- Photo gallery (Gallery on Dreamhost and then MobileMe)
- Calendar (MobileMe)
- Address book (MobileMe)
- DNS (Dreamhost)
- Domain registration (Mythic Beasts)
Earlier in the year I moved my email (still forwarded from Dreamhost), calendar, and address book to Google. More recently I moved my photo gallery to Google Picasa. This has means I have moved everything I had on MobileMe to free services provided by Google. In fact, GMail has proved far superior to MobileMe as it allows me to send emails from my preferred (non-Google) email address - something MobileMe never did (I had to bodge it by send email out through Dreamhost to achieve the same result with MobileMe).
This week I received an email reminding me that my Dreamhost account was due to be renewed, so I decided it was time to find a less expensive place to host my blog, perform email forwarding, and provide DNS for my domains.
- http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/ enabled me to port my blog from Wordpress to Google Blogger
- http://www.ukreg.com/ provides free web-forwarding, email forwarding, and DNS for domains registered with them
Oh, and I now use links to content in a public Dropbox folder for file-hosting.