[Leica] OT: Web site host

[jbmmllug at jbm.org (Jeff Moore)]

 As far as email - I think the single most important piece of advice I can
give (I give it over and over, solicited or unsolicited, and of course it's
roundly ignored) is: *never ever ever use an email address provided by your
internet service provider as your primary email address to give out to
people* and hope to use consistently for years.  All that does is lock you
into continuing to use that ISP because of what a hassle is is to try to
tell everybody a new address to use.

An ISP should be purely a utility, a pipe, a source of bandwidth you can
switch whenever another carrier can give you better service or a better
financial deal.  Don't let yourself get locked in by falling for that free
email address they'll offer you.

So... a gmail address remains a fine choice (they do good spam detection,
and have really useful message archiving and search features).

Gmail isn't free - you pay for it by letting then advertise to you.  But I
still trust Google, because they have a good history of being transparent
about how they'll use any information they glean about you (and I've seen
them go well out of their way to make sure I saw and read any updates to
those terms and conditions before they went into effect - this by dramatic
contrast with Facebook, which routinely slips changes in under the radar).

You can use a regular @gmail.com address, or you can have Google handle
email for your personal domain.

You can also opt to buy the Gmail and Google Apps / Drive service by paying
$5/month per user in lieu of being advertised to.

As far as a website... the number of options is insane.  Note that if you
have a purely static, read-only-for-viewers, no backend functionality at
all website...  a pretty straightforward way to put up a static site which
is really robust under load is to serve it from an Amazon S3 bucket.  You
can look it up if you're interested and don't know what that means;  the
approach may or not appeal to you.