Tech: Building a Website + Email

Subject: Tech: Building a Website + Email
From: Joe Offer
Date: 10 Dec 21 - 12:15 AM

Looks like I'm the Webmaster for our cohousing project. I inherited a GoDaddy Website, and one Gmail e-mail address that is linked to a member's personal account. The Web pages are *.php files. I don't know anything about PHP, but I found I could copy an existing page and insert HTML instead of the previous data, and it worked just fine.

I tried setting the Gmail account to it could be accessed by the various committee members who needed to use it, but I could not find a good way to share a Gmail address without compromising the owner's Google account information. Can anybody tell me how to set up shared Gmail accounts?

When I've purchased domain names in the past, they came with a large number of email addresses - at least a hundred, sometimes more. But this GoDaddy domain name isn't like this. It appears to supply one free email address - IF I put it on Microsoft 365. Additional email addresses have a monthly fee. Is anybody familiar with a way to get free email addresses with a domain name from GoDaddy.

I inherited a GoDaddy website for another organization a few years ago, and I found it too difficult to deal with GoDaddy. Eventually, I moved the Website to my personal Network Solutions hosting package. It took me a bit longer to transfer the domain name to Network Solutions, but I did it.

So, my current plan is to transfer the domain name to Network Solutions and use their email, and use the hosting package I already have. But does anyone have any experience with GoDaddy and how I can get email at a reasonable price from them without having to buy into Microsoft 365?

Thanks.

-Joe-

Subject: RE: Tech: Building a Website + Email
From: DaveRo
Date: 10 Dec 21 - 03:19 AM

Joe Offer wrote: ...does anyone have any experience with GoDaddy and how I can get email at a reasonable price from them without having to buy into Microsoft 365?

You don't have to have your website and email hosted by the same provider, though it's obviously convenient. (The DNS record can point http and email to different places.)

I would find a company that provides the email service you want and ask them. You may be better off with a small hosting company so you can actually talk to them.

It sounds like the website is basically OK so you just need to patch it and maybe add a page or two occasionally. But if it's using php you need to know why it is. Was it built with a tool that generated php by default, or does it have active content - e.g. a database of members?

If you only want a simple website (webserver only - no php. database, or Wordpress etc) they might do that cheaper than Go Daddy.

I thought recently that I might offer to take over an organisation's website. It was a mess, it needed redeveloping. I concluded WordPress was the way to go - I already knew it as a blogger. In the end I didn't. (And I have time - you probably don't.)

Subject: RE: Tech: Building a Website + Email
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 10 Dec 21 - 07:44 AM

I think we worked out that, in common with the hosting I use, your GoDaddy one uses CPanel, Joe. You would probably find a selection of email tools there.

You may also find that the chosen package does place some restrictions. With my hosting for example, I appear to be unlimited on the number of email accounts I can have for one domain so I could go ahead and add say jon@, joe@, dave@ chosendomain at will. I am limited to five (one main and four addon) domain names though and email usage counts towards my total disk usage.

Subject: RE: Tech: Building a Website + Email
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 10 Dec 21 - 08:02 AM

Just a drift on php, Joe. Folkinfo was a php/mysql site. I converted the songdb you kindly offered to host to html. When the site was active, I wanted a number of things to be dynamic and you need some form of scripting for that. html however made more sense (no additional hosting requirements and maybe safer) for the archive.

Subject: RE: Tech: Building a Website + Email
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 10 Dec 21 - 08:08 AM

Anahata does all that sort of stuff to. Drop him an email.

Subject: RE: Tech: Building a Website + Email
From: DaveRo
Date: 10 Dec 21 - 09:31 AM

Joe Offer wrote: I tried setting the Gmail account to it could be accessed by the various committee members who needed to use it, but I could not find a good way to share a Gmail address without compromising the owner's Google account information. Can anybody tell me how to set up shared Gmail accounts?

After a bit of googling, I conclude that sharing gmail accounts is a feature of Google Groups. (This could, however, be because any query containing the word 'group' leads to Google Groups.)

Google Groups has a feature called 'collaborative inbox' which looks relevant
Make a group a Collaborative Inbox

I've been a member of several Google Groups over the years and I've never thought of them as an email service, but I know it's evolved over the years so who knows what they are nowadays? A Group still has what I think of as a forum (the threads of which may be what they call a conversation) but how that relates to these group emails I don't know. I think you'd have to set one up and try it.

Subject: RE: Tech: Building a Website + Email
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 10 Dec 21 - 11:49 AM

Definitely move the email to a new address and group system. I work on a site that shares a lot of stuff and any time one password changes the whole cascade of changes needed across our different computers is not pretty to behold.