1. Get a Domain Name

I usually use GoDaddy to get a domain name. They have a pretty complicated interface, but they're slowly making it better. Other people use Dreamhost or Verio, but they either require a signup fee or are too hard to use.

2. Sign up for Google Apps

There are multiple editions for Google Apps, but we'll setup the (free) Standard Edition.

  1. Google Apps Signup Form: Fill out the signup form, enter your domain name (e.g. "viatropos.com").
  2. Specify that you'll "upload an html file" in the last step of the signup process. Then just create a file googlehostedservice.html at the root of your app and paste the code they give you into it.

3. Point the Google Apps to Subdomains of your Domain

First, you should manage your domain names with Zerigo. Main reasons:

  1. They have a very minimal interface (compare it to GoDaddy's insanely overloaded one!).
  2. They have the best support I have seen so far in the Rails community: they've answered all (5) of my questions within 10 minutes of me asking them, through email! Once I asked at 2am on Saturday (Sunday morning) and they responded in 5 minutes.
  3. It's free up to x number of requests (a good amount).

The only limitation with the free version of Zerigo: you can only have 3 sites. You can get around this (as Heroku does) by creating multiple accounts, no problem.

Add CNAME's for each of the Google Apps you want to use, looks like this:

Zerigo CNAME record

When you've entered them all, it should look like this:

Zerigo Google Apps

Now check out http://mail.viatropos.com/ and the-like and you're good to go. May take 48 hours or so to update so give it a chance. The actual urls are at http://mail.google.com/a/viatropos.com

4. Register Your Website with Google Webmaster Tools

Click here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ and place the following meta tag into the head of the index.html file:

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<html>
  <head>
    <meta name="google-site-verification" content="my-code" />
    <title> My title </title>
  </head> 
  <body>
    page contents
  </body>
</html>