Google Apps for Your Domain: A new era of hosting?

Recently Google made a new service available: Google Apps for Your Domain which allows you to create Web content for a Web site hosted by Google with private-labeled e-mail, IM and calendar tools.

You sign up by logging in with your existing GMail account or by requesting a new one and then completing a registration form which asks for the details of your organization, the required domain name (which you must have already registered elsewhere), and the number of e-mail accounts you want. The next step is Setup where you choose an administrator’s name and password and agree to the terms and conditions.

Google goes to great lengths to help you configure your domain by telling you in detail how to set up your DNS MX records to redirect your e-mail to GMail and how to point the world to your Web site.

Google Apps for Your Domain provides four services: E-mail for the number of users you requested with 2GB of storage and the standard GMail search tools; instant messaging available to your users when logged in; a calendar which can be shared with other users; and Web pages creation, storage and editing.

The e-mail service supports bulk user account creation which is something that isn’t offered by many service providers particularly e-mail service providers (funny how good Google is at getting these usability features right) and the administrator can also set up e-mail lists for all accounts to use.

One weakness is that users are either administrators with god-like powers or they are just users; hopefully a little more granularity will be available in future versions such as the ability to manage subgroups of users and the content of specific pages.

Google Apps for Your Domain provides Web page creation and editing through Google Page Creator (beta) which I’ve written about before; it’s integration with Google Apps for Your Domain makes page creation painless.

Google Calendar provides calendaring service and the company notes that they “will soon include additional features specifically for Google Apps for Your Domain” by which I assume they mean more tightly integrated group services for domain members.

Google also offers a variant of Google Apps for Your Domain called Google Apps for Education, which supports everything but Web page content.

This service could really upset some of the more consumer and small business oriented hosting providers. In addition, the inclusion of other Google Web services such blogging, mapping, photo and video storage, backup storage, etc., would, as Emeril Lagasse often says, “kick it up a notch.” Google could potentially redefine the value of hosting and bring in a new era of personal publishing and support services. We can only hope that they leave enough room for third party developers to add value and create a supportive business ecosystem.

The Google Apps for Your Domain service is currently free and (you guessed it) in beta. Google notes on the sign up page and in the preferences setup that a premium version of the Google Apps for Your Domain service is planned.