[Bryson]

So, my .Mac renewal date came up, and £69 was just too rich for me. I just can't justify spending that kind of money on the services it provides. So, the irritation of telling people I've changed e-mails aside, I need to replace the functionality at a lower cost. To be honest, the primary things I used .Mac for was:

Email: I have a decent hotmail.com address, and in the end, I think that's probably ok. Unless anyone else has a better idea...?

Storage...sort of. 99.9% of the storage I had was full of images I've used in forums, sent there by Imagewell. I do like the convenience and speed that Imagewell's integration with .Mac had.

I didn't use .mac to sync, and while I half-heartedly used it to backup "settings" I could do that easily with an external HD anyway.

What I want is something (or somethings) that will do the above for me, at minimal cost, and won't disappear on me....

[iThink therefore iMac]

I'm not renewing my .Mac which expires at the end of the month...I'm going to stick to using gmail for e-mail but I'm also looking for substitutes for the rest...

[Brad]

DreamHost and Surpass Hosting are two good, inexpensive web hosting solutions. Both have fairly cheap offers for storage and email (and lots of other stuff you probably won't use). The only catch, of course, is that you'll have to buy a domain name to use.

DreamHost's entry-level offer:

• US$9.95 per month (or US$7.99 per month if you agree to a two-year commitment)
• 168 GB of storage
• 1.67 TB of bandwidth
• 3000 POP or IMAP email accounts
• WebDAV access (meaning you can mount a share in the Finder)
• various other goodies, including many "One Click Installs"

Surpass Hosting's entry-level offer:

• US$6.00 per month
• 200 GB of storage
• 1.95 TB of bandwidth
• unlimited email accounts (POP or IMAP? Not specified...)
• various other goodies

Of course, once you do the math, unless you intend to use lots of storage or email accounts, these solutions still are not a lot cheaper than .Mac. Plus there's the matter of having to set them up. So, it's really a matter of how much you want to save a few pounds.

[turtle]

Brad's suggestion is what I'm doing. My .Mac is up in about 55 days and I'm letting it go in favor of my web support coming from Surpass Hosting. $60 USD per year for almost everything .Mac offered. I can put iWeb there, though I have personally switched to WordPress, my wife still uses iWeb. With Surpass it is IMAP (or POP) email access. I'll be hosting all my images from there that I don't want to host from my Mini. You don't even have to get a domain name, but for $7 from GoDaddy using the code LIFE1 and it makes it one sweet deal. I use Transmit FTP client and it is smooth enough that my non-techie wife can post images for her eBay listings. The other thing about Surpass that really sold me was the user forums for support. Really friendly (like here even) and most of the staff uses the forums themselves.

[Kraetos]

Having used both:

Surpass is what I am on currently, and I am in the process of migrating my last DreamHost site over.

Advantages:
- Faster, friendler support
- More for less
- Better admin interface (CPanel X vs. Dreamhost's Proprietary interface)

And the only disadvantage:
- The email, while IMAP, doesn't integrate with Mail.app. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is, but it can't save drafts, can't access sent messages or the trash. It can send just fine, but its still a pain in the ass and prevents me from using it as my main email address. (I have toyed with the idea of using some other Mail client, but I don't know which one to choose. Any advice?)

[torifile]

I've got dreamhost and it works just fine. You can find insane coupons to make your hosting really cheap for the year. No problems with reliablity going on 3 or 4 months now.

[Brad]

Originally Posted by Kraetos - Better admin interface (CPanel X vs. Dreamhost's Proprietary interface)

"Better" is definitely a matter of opinion. I know some people hate cPanel. AppleNova's servers use cPanel X and I definitely would rate its UI as "meh", sometimes "feh". On any given day, I'd take DreamHost's custom panel (I have a DH site) over cPanel.

But, again, that's a matter of personal preference.

[turtle]

Originally Posted by Kraetos And the only disadvantage: - The email, while IMAP, doesn't integrate with Mail.app. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is, but it can't save drafts, can't access sent messages or the trash. It can send just fine, but its still a pain in the ass and prevents me from using it as my main email address. (I have toyed with the idea of using some other Mail client, but I don't know which one to choose. Any advice?)

This is my only complaint too.That and I have to acknowledge an invalid certificate every now and then when connecting. I'm not worried about the sent because I have everything BCC'ed back to me. I will say that I can see the trash and Sent folder from my cell phone. It's weird.

[scratt]

Sad to say I am glad to see that more people are ditching .Mac.

I really think more people should do this and get whichever dept. at Apple deals with it to re-think / re-work the whole .Mac package.

If Apple sorted it out I would go back....

I have more or less completely switched to Gmail and other Google services now, and actually find that POP access to GMail is better when I am on the move in Asia than IMAP on .Mac.

For hosting I just use a portion of my business hosting to handle all of that, and to be honest if you just want simple hosting, with the same limitations as .Mac then it can be had for next to free these days if you shop around.

[turtle]

Since this seems to be a good thread for it:
How would I go about manually syncing things like my Safari Bookmarks and other setting that are common between systems. I actually like this feature but figure I can just create an Automator workflow to pull the files I want and upload them to my web host. Then I can do the reverse on the flip side. Any once know where these things can be found? Specifically:

• Bookmarks (Safari and Firefox)
• iCal
• Contacts
• Keychains
• Mail.app (Rules & Accounts)
• Other app "favorites"

[Kraetos]

Originally Posted by Brad "Better" is definitely a matter of opinion. I know some people hate cPanel. AppleNova's servers use cPanel X and I definitely would rate its UI as "meh", sometimes "feh". On any given day, I'd take DreamHost's custom panel (I have a DH site) over cPanel. But, again, that's a matter of personal preference.

Good point. And I haven't tried out DreamHost's new interface, either.

[joveblue]

Gmail is better than Hotmail (/ Windows Live Mail). There's also a widget and an application available from http://www.google.com/mac.html to make checking your email easier if you want. Also I think it's Google Toolbar that will allow you to use Gmail as your "mailto:" client, if you use Firefox at all...

Doesn't your ISP come with any server space? If it's just some forum images it should be sufficient.

[Bryson]

I don't want to use my ISP as I don't want to have to move it all when I change ISP later this year. I'll take a look at the other choices.