Moving my online presence

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

Now pretty much all of my online presence is hosted on Google, with my domains registered on (and email forwarding and DNS provided by) UKReg.  I have now gone from using two expensive services to just having to pay for my domain registrations.

Oh, and I now use links to content in a public Dropbox folder for file-hosting.