Regarding GrandCentral, I know a few people that have this and one of the great services it provides is sending voicemail to an email address. I find it quite a chore to listen to my voicemail, but if it was just an attachment in an email, I’ll listen all day long.

Fax to Email and Email to Fax
We provide fax to email (fax2email) and email to fax (email2fax) services.

Email to fax allows you to send a fax to any fax machine, anywhere in the world, simply by sending an email. You sign up, add your email address as an authorised user for your account, add some credit (a minimum of £2) and then you’re ready to go.

Outbound faxes costs 10.5p per page for UK faxes, can be sent anywhere in the world and we support Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Adobe PDF, Tiff, JPEG and many other formats as attachments for your Email to fax.

Fax to email is our inbound fax service, which allows you to receive faxes from other people via email. We give you your own business fax number, or multiple numbers if needed. You tell us where to send faxes that arrive on that number to. When a fax comes in to your number, we convert it to an Adobe PDF document, add it as an attachment to an email and send it through to you.

You can sign up for fax to email, email to fax, or both. Email to fax has no standing charges, for fax to email, we charge you a standing charge of £2 each month for the inbound fax number and that’s it.

For those who are unaware, a domain name is the “.com” (or other extension) which is the address for a website.

Their domain registrations are only around $7 per year, as opposed to paying a montly fee. Also the domains come with a bunch of other free stuff, including an easy website builder with hosting included (if you don’t mind a small ad placement), or without ads their hosting costs about 4 bucks a month currently.

Having a website is also a must-have for any business, no matter what size.

nice post. You mention the most important points.
I just want to mention the differences here in Germany:

What I’m wondering about, is the costs you have to calculate over there in the US for all the different solutions. The prices for (shared) offices are the same in Germany, but concerning telephony, I see especially SOHO-Users use a VoiceOverIP-Flatrate, as don’t have a complex telephony system they might have to reorganize as big firms. These flatrates are often only provided including Internet (that’s the matter of expense you didn’t talk about ) and it only costs around 80-100 € for SOHOS, sometimes you can even use the private offers for around 35 € incl. www & VoIP flat.
2) Same goes here, there are several ad free virtual fax services for business professionals, some like sipgate you can even use without a monthly basic fee and they charge you only for the exact amount of sent faxes. So no need to buy a fax machine, which will be a hassle, especially if you buy the cheapest model.
3) Mailboxes: They are both used by businesses and private persons and go for a cheap 15 € (~ US$ 27) installation fee and you’re not charged a monthly fee! Although those don’t include your packages. But for this, there is currently also service named “PACKSTATION” implemented by DHL.
4) Business E-Mail Addresses. Something that is so normal to me, that I have one since I’m 16. In this case, you go with DreamHost which is really the best and cheapest solution, as in Germany Webhosting on the contrary seems to be a little more expensive. But I would recommend everyone at least a professional e-mail address!

Kind regards,

Philipp Grunwald

(I’m not associated with this company, I just thought it might be helpful to this subject.)