It's been a week now since we packed up and moved into the cloud. The cloud is, of course, Google, who now hosts our email and calendaring (and a host of other features), all addressed by my domain, northerncrown.com. $50/year/user for all this stuff. $4/month, which is less than the apocryphal half-caf double-foam latte that we snarkily use as a unit of measure when describing waste and American profligacy. And I don't smoke!

"Can't you get free webmail already," I hear you sigh. In these days of telephone number portability and cheap domain ownership ($9/year with GoDaddy), I really wasn't interested in giving up my email address to move to a gmail address or even my dear old AOL. I've owned northerncrown.com for nearly ten years now (whois reports "Creation Date: 17-aug-1998"), and like my cellphone number (nine years old), I intend to keep it forever. I see a future of daughter1@northerncrown.com, daughter2@northerncrown.com, and on and on. It's our place, a veritable family compound on the Internet.

What'd I give up? I gave up reading mail via pine. I gave up manipulating mail as chunks of files on a filesystem, archiving and such. Some level of privacy, I think.

What'd I gain? A very nice web client. IMAP access. Access to mail from everywhere. Great searching of email contents. Top-notch spam filtering. Shared calendaring with the rest of my family that works well. Freedom from worries about backups. Room for years of mail. I have some ten years of mail keepers archived and it's less than 1GB. The new account offers 25GB per user.

"Are you a paid spokesman/mouthpiece/lackey/fanboi/apologist for the GOOG?" Nope, just a satisfied customer.

So, my family and friends, if you need a permanent home on the Internet, one that need not ever change, no matter your ISP or cable company's machinations, let me know. Northerncrown can be your home, too.