So after a few late nights, my move from traditional hosting for things like email, websites, photos etc to a world of shared services and clouds is complete.

During this move, whilst the technical part of the move has proven to be very straight forward, I have found myself having to rethink how I work and adapt to suit.

A good example of this has been how I organise email.

Now I will be honest here and admit that I never ever delete emails either at home or at work. This means I have email going back to 1999 which is when I decided to stop deleting but this also means I have a lot of email sat in PST files. Historically I have managed this (together with the spam that comes with it) by using multiple mail accounts with various aliases and white lists. I then managed all of this into Outlook with a large number of folders, folders within folders and quite complex rule sets.

So when I first started transferring my mail across to the Google platform I took the same approach especially as I was accessing my mail accounts with Outlook over IMAP. So I ended up with 5 separate mail accounts with many aliases set up within them. I then had folders set up in Outlook which were represented in the Google web interface by labels.

As I then started to explore the web interface I realised that I had to rethink this approach as it is very outdated and is hard work. Lets be honest, the Google mail platform has been developed for the users of today and calls on non mail technologies (such as search) to help organise things. In addition the anti spam technology is very advanced.

So I started again.

I now have a single account. I have just 7 labels within it. I am still using aliases on my emails however with one mail account, you can catch all so I can then filter on the to address and label the email on arrival bypassing the inbox all together. So now all those emails are organised on arrival and show up against the relevant label helping me work out where I need to focus my efforts

This is similar in the way I have worked in the past but not at such a macro level.

On top of this, all those thousands of emails from the years have simply been archived. Yes I can get to them to browse through them if I really want to but of course the Google way is to search and I have found that this works really well.

I guess it’s all right to lump everything together in one place just as long as there is a way to interrogate it. Search is that tool

As I said before, I have to start thinking in different way but with a single account available via a browser, a client or my mobile life should become a lot simper and the plan is to spend a lot less time managing my email which seems to be disproportional to the time spent actually reading it.

But what about the rest?

Well I moved from hosting my own images online a few months ago now and started using SmugMug. To be fair, I have not looked back on that move as it just works and again, I just need to concentrate on taking the photos and not managing the platform used to display them. Sure I know that under the skin, SmugMug uses the Amazon S3 platform but I don’t need to care.

And of course there is WordPress.

Yes I was using WordPress before but I hosted it on my own server. Each new update saw me messing about with FTP clients and PHP files whilst at the same time I had to keep an eye on my bandwidth usage and spam levels.

Before moving to WordPress.com I did look at Blogger and TypePad but WordPress is a very powerful platform that just keeps getting better so here we are.

So at the end of next month, my old hosted server contract comes to an end and after nearly 10 years of working in that way, I will not be renewing this time.

Yes it has taken a long time for me to take this jump (especially when you consider what I do) but I have been waiting for a time when I felt the technology and services had matured enough for me to place my online life on somebody else’s hands. After all, Google have only just taken the beta tag off their platform.

To a point I now feel liberated and freed from the hassle of having to maintain the platform that supports my online life. Sure I am a little apprehensive that at some point the whole cloud will come crashing down but it would actually be very easy to revert back to a self hosted model if I ever had to so maybe I just worry to much.

Of course what is going to be really interested is the whole online Microsoft Office thing that is just around the corner. If that is as good as the early beta reports suggest then I may find even more of my life heading up into the clouds (such as document storage etc) but I will deal with that when it actually arrives and is actually live and stable. After all, it’s one thing outsourcing my online life but my offline life still has strong routes in the filing cabinet.