Hosting

I use and recommend Nearlyfreespeech.net. It's the ideal host for low-volume sites, and (probably) a serviceable host for high-volume ones.

Managing applications

I can't be bothered to maintain a mail server, so I use Google Apps. To set up a domain to use Google Apps for email:
  1. Sign up for a Google Apps account for the domain.
  2. Configure your MX (Mail eXchange) records at your host to use Google's email servers
    1. Google has instructions for NearlyFreeSpeech.net
    2. General instructions are at the Google Apps help page for configuring email delivery
  3. To make logging into the domain-specific Gmail account easier, you can create a special subdomain for logging into email
    1. Here's Google's instructions
    2. Basically, at your host you create a CNAME record that looks like this (note the trailing dot, required at NFS.net):
    3.  mail.mydomain.com CNAME ghs.google.com.

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