Domain Hosting

The main players in this arena is Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Seeing that we have to pay for .co.za in South Africa, I'm not worried about that part, plus always believed keep the DNS and hosting separate. I do my own DNS servers from my work, so not even that is a problem.

If you cannot use your own DNS servers, or do not have access to DNS servers, look at DynDNS ( http://www.dyndns.com ) first. I've had a couple of co.za domains on there servers before, just get the Uniform submission correct.

Now leaving my choice to last, here is what I tried:

Microsoft Office Live:
http://home.officelive.com
I ended up using the UK server, because this seemed to have free accounts, 5 only. But then after setting everything up I realised that the custom domain was limited to a preset list. Cannot use any domain. That was enough to let me give up.

Yahoo Small Business:
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/
"US$8.96 for the first 3 months (US$11.95/month after)" sound exactly like a cellphone contract from some of our networks. I did not even read further.

Google Apps:
http://www.google.co.za/a/
Still my choice. Free, 100 mailboxes at 7.271981Gb (this changes daily) per mailbox, spam & virus filters, Docs & Sites and much more. And bets of all, co.za support! Or rather they tell you what to add to the DNS (some CNAME's) and it works.

Cheers