Email forwarding and website recommendation

I am lauching a small business. It is not landscaping but we can use that as an example.

I send out postcards and want people to go to a website where they email sales@landscapiting.com. I want the email to forwards to my regular gmail account. I only expect about one or two inquiries a month. While I know Microsoft has free website hosting, I don't think the email will forward to my gmail account. I do not want to have to remember to log into a separate account to check the email, I will react immediately when if someone emails me.

The website would be a static page as the service requires I go meet with the prospect and quote the business. I would like them to be able to email me from the webpage. I want the webpage to say sales@(nameofbusiness.com). I do not want to put my gmail account on the website.

Free places that host the website with email forwarding would be great, but if I have to pay for the website host and the email forwarding, I can do that as well.

Recommendations appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Google Apps for your domain is the way to go. Standard edition is free, and is perfect for light needs like yours. You can use google sites for the web page, and the gmail component for your email. It works great, and you'll find that you can easily integrate it with your existing gmail account so all your email comes to the same place. When an email comes in to sales@landscaping.com, you can set it up so when you respond the email comes from the address sales@landscaping.com.

I would not recommend 1and1. Their servers go down a lot. Some people may have good luck with them, but many others don't. I've had 4 or 5 clients run away from 1and1.com this year.

One of them was actually sent to collections when their credit card expired. They claim 1and1 never contacted them to let them know about the expired credit card. I googled this scenario and found it happens to a lot of people.

GoDaddy will serve you fine for that item. And it costs less than $10 / yr

namesecure.com has free email forwarding with domain registration.

--or at least they used to. I don't see it on their front page. May be worth looking for.

mswallet2 said: Free domains with hosting -- watch out for hosting companies charging you a fee for the domain, should you end the hosting within X months. The number of months depends on the hosting company's fine print.
Once I had a free domain name from one of those free sites. One day it disappeared. I queried them about it and they acted like I never had it. Not that it mattered much, since I wouldnt have obtained that domain at that time if it wasn't free. I did learn, however, that you can't trust any company giving away services for free.