We have been hosting email for ourselves and for some clients on our dedicated server at MediaTemple, a US hosting company, We’ve run into some problems because MediaTemple no longer specifically supports email hosting (even though we continue to host email) so we are evaluating other providers. We switched to Gmail as an email hosting service but we find them very expensive and their system is very cumbersome. Configuring a client requires doing things “their way” as opposed to what we’ve been used to configuring email clients on other providers, e.g. simply entering userid, password, inbound and outbound servers as shown here (for Apple Mail): Apple Mail Config — Postimages. Their tech support people are all in India and have very heavy accents making them extremely difficult to understand and deal with (they are courteous, though practically unintelligible).
The benefit of our old system hosting an email server on our dedicated hosting server (email and websites) is that it was not expensive (flat rate for everything) and the dashboard in Plesk was extremely user-friendly.
So what I’d like to know is this: who else is there that provides email hosting service at a reasonable price with a user-friendly admin dashboard? I’d appreciate any input anybody can give.
Another option might be Hover, if you use them for your DNS and domain registry. I do this for clients, to put everything in one pot and thus one bill they won’t miss. Their mail service is not expensive if you aren’t trying to stash huge files there. EasyMail is probably the cheapest overall, and FastMail the most expensive (but the most fully-featured).
Hover is hosting in the US, while EasyMail and FastMail have off-shore hosting (or at least the option, with the latter) if privacy, long arm of the law, etc. are important to your customers. Nothing about e-mail is actually private – it’s about as private as a postcard if I’m honest.
Walter, I signed up for a Fastmail test account and was completely blown away by the fact that they have setup guides for Android, iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, Mac, Outlook, and Thunderbird where you simply point your smartphone camera at a QR code (for iPhone and Android) or download a configuration file and it does all the rest. Brilliant. I’m sold. We’ve been using Gmail for our new company www.flippit.com and they’ve been really difficult to deal with—and much more expensive ($12 /user/month). Plus I trust Google about as far as I can throw them. Looks like Fastmail will be the way we go.
I checked hover but they only offer email if they hold your domain name which we’re not going to do.
Walter, do you have an agency account af Fastmail or do you just sign each client up individually? I see that one can convert a paying account into a reseller account:
I don’t do any reselling on this account. All of my clients so far have had their mail set up already somewhere else, and the most I have needed to get them to do is set up an SMTP forwarding service to handle transactional mail like purchase confirmation or password resets. I will always have them set that up, and then share the credentials with me temporarily while I configure the application I’ve built for them.