Why the new email address?

Hello,

My new email address, hosted at Google‘s Gmail has a meaning similar to: “from SEO going to CEO”. A few details on this.

1. What’s the meaning of the name?

I had three hypotheses in mind:

a. I liked the consonance SEO (search engine optimization) – CEO (chief executive officer)

While not a very funny thing, while not originally my idea (see this SEO software – Web CEO), it’s still a quite nice name, a bit amusing;

b. My services are addressed generally to decision-taking persons (CEO’s)

So, in other words, I do SEO services, working for CEOs of companies;
And the problem with this is that it may be misinterpreted – I do SEO for the CEO themselves, instead of the company; yes, a little unwanted result;

c. It (sort of) describes what I do

I’m a SEO freelancer, and I own my own business (CEO);

d. Finally, easy to type and remember

Very important aspect – only 8 letters to type, nothing fancy or complicated;

2. (technical issues) Why Gmail servers? Why not hosting the web address at your own domain?

a. They never seem to fail

Let’s have it like this; according to the Wall Street Journal, at the end of 2009 – beginning of 2010, Gmail had “176 million unique visitors in December, according to comScore Inc.”; if there’s a failure, Gmail servers are down:
a. Something is not working everybody knows about it – I immediately know if my data is down;
b. Things will get fix (most likely) very fast – a matter of hours top;
Now, I can’t say the same thing about other types of hosting; so Gmail’s reliability is better than most;

b. Other tech users like it

In technical circles, such as that of the readers of Lifehacker, Gmail is the predominant choice;

c. I like it a lot

Yes, I’ve been using Gmail for a full five years and I’m very impressed with what they offer;

d. Why not Gmail on my own domain?

Yes, I could have setup to have Gmail on my own domain; I tend not to prefer this option, due to the simple fact that it just tends to make things even more worse: the time on which Gmail is not working (downtime) will be doubled by the downtime of my own server; too much fuss for a simple name;
Update: according to a friend who works as a System Administrator, I can have a solution for Google to completely handle my emails, so if my hosting is down, my email will still work; didn’t know about this, sorry;

3. Practical steps

a. You can still send me emails at any of my old email addresses on Gmail

Yes, Gmail has email forwarding, all the emails get to me; Yahoo! doesn’t, so I manually check those email addresses once a week (for the rare cases in which I get emails on Yahoo!);

b. Any of the email that I’ve switched with you is safely kept on my account

Rarely (if ever) do I delete an email; it’s all been archived.