Goodbye Internet freeloading

There are a few good free services I use to keep hosting costs down. I have been using them for the last couple of years and I'd recommend them.

1. I use zoneedit for DNS - they do mail forwarding so all my mail gets sent to gmail. This is good as you don't need to pay for a server at all to have a reasonable mail service. Zoneedit is free for 5 domains so I use everydns if I need more until the millions roll in. Everydns doesn't forward mail unfortunately but they don't have a limit on free domains.
2. directnic.com have $15/year domain registration for .com. They work well and remind me when to renew - this seems to be a problem for registers as Tucows paid $250K on ebay for Kiko's calander.
3. I asked NTL Ireland about a business cable service a while back but their entry level business offering was €25K which would buy me a supercomputer with a dedicated server hosting equivalent so I stuck with the 1M home line. I have an old Shuttle XPC under the tv that runs Ubuntu Linux that acts as my main server. I put Linux firmware DD-WRT on my Linksys WRT54G wireless router so it could act as a firewall and port forwarder to the Ubuntu box. It worked well has been running for months. It might be a false economy as it could cost €215 a year to for electricity though.

zoneedit with gmail is great as a spam filter and mail store so that's probably the best tip if you want to save money. I want move into a world-class data center for sound business reasons (i.e. to stop the kids from killing my server when they switch off the tv) so I'll be switching off the shuttle and moving everything to aplus.net over the next couple of days.