Secure email hosting: The complete list of email hosting service providers for your domain

Let me tell you a story.

Back in 2012.

Barack Obama raised a staggering $690million to finance his re-election campaign as the 44th president of the United States.

That was the highest figure ever raised by a politician for an election campaign. But what is even more mind-boggling is that he raised almost all of that money through a well-crafted email campaign.

No government funding. No GoFundMe campaigns.

Just good old email.

Email is king

With an ROI of $42 for every $1 spent on email. It’s easy to see why email remains one of the most powerful marketing and communication tools.

As with Obama, anyone with access to a ~~computer~~ smartphone, and an internet connection can amass a multi-million dollar fortune through email marketing.

The complete list of email hosting companies for your custom domain

Email hosting companies include Zoho, Gsuite by Google, Office 365 Business Premium by Microsoft, Icewarp Cloud, Amazon Workmail, Protonmail, Tutanota, Rackspace, and Atmail.

In this post, we will review each of these email service providers so you can see which one is best for you.

Some of these email hosting providers are suitable for teams and individuals, others are perfect for white-labeled email reseller programs while a few are top-picks for privacy-conscious customers.

The problem with email. And why it’s necessary to invest in cloud-hosted email

Email is fraught with issues such as security, privacy, storage, sending limits, and delivery rates.

These issues become a big deal when you consider the fact that almost 55% of all emails sent daily land in the spam folder.

Hit the primary inbox, not the spam folder

Email hosting companies exist to iron out all the pitfalls and headaches that come with email.

They liberate you to freely concentrate on your core tasks so you can enjoy 99% inbox delivery rates.

To read more about why you need to host your email with premium email hosting providers then check out this post

The complete list of email service providers.

In no particular order.

1) Zoho Mail

Zoho is an ecosystem of business software that includes CRM, document processing, and HR and IT management systems.

But perhaps, it is their CRM and mail hosting service (Zoho Mail) that has put Zoho on the radar. Today we will focus on their free plan which offers

Free email hosting for a single domain
Up to five users, with 5GB storage per user and a 25MB limit on attachments
Webmail access on all browsers
Zoho email client for iOS and Android

The premium tier kicks things off with the Mail Lite plan which will set you back just $1/month (billed annually).

Mail Lite unlocks features such as email hosting for multiple domains.

But if you want to use Zoho’s collaboration and document processing software, then you will need to upgrade to Zoho Workplace which costs $3/month per user billed annually.

Zoho Mail: The Advantages

Affordable: The free plan is adequate for one or two people working for the same organization. The Workplace plan is priced at $3/month per user (which is half the price of Google’s G Suite)
Easy to use. The set-up wizard helps you configure your domain name so you can be up and running in no time. Zoho provides additional instructions for situations where your domain name is with separate DNS providers and domain registrars such as Cloudflare and Namecheap.

Zoho Mail: The Disadvatages

Support: If you’re on the free plan then support will be a bit slow. This can be a letdown especially when you need immediate assistance.
Integration: Though Zoho boasts a platform that goes blow for blow against Google’s and Microsoft’s offerings. Google wields a monopoly with its powerful search engine and the ubiquitous Chrome browser. This is enough to limit what Zoho can do as Google enjoys tight integration with almost all third-party extensions and software services.
No third-party email clients on the free plan. You are forced to use Zoho’s mobile email client for Android or iOS. Usage of popular third-party email clients such as Spike, Edison Mail, Mailbird, Thunderbird, and Outlook is only unlocked when you upgrade to one of Zohomail’s premium plans.

Zoho Mail Pricing

Mail lite for $1/month billed yearly

Mail Premium at $4/month billed annually

Workplace at $3/month billed yearly

2) G Suite

According to Litmus (https://emailclientmarketshare.com/), the second most popular email client for February 2020 based on open rates is Gmail.

Almost everyone uses or has used Gmail personal accounts before.

Take Gmail further

With G Suite, you can customize vanilla Gmail by adding your professional domain name and custom email addresses to your account.

G Suite preserves the familiar look and feel of Gmail, but it removes those pesky ads that infest the free Gmail accounts.

With a G Suite subscription, you also get Google’s suite of document processing software such as Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

G Suite Pricing

Pricing for G Suite starts at $6/month for the basic plan, then $12 for the Business plan, and $25/month per user for the Enterprise plan.

What separates these plans is mainly storage space but the sweet spot is the Business plan which rewards each user with a bountiful terabyte of storage space.

G Suite: The Advantages

The familiar look and feel of Gmail guarantees ease of use for new and experienced users.
Unlimited storage is available on the business plan ($12/month) but only if you have a team of five users or more. This is welcome news for larger teams and organizations
Powerful cloud search: Google owns the most powerful search engine so it’s no surprise that searching for documents and emails stored across multiple users is lightning fast and accurate. However, cloud search across multiple users is available only on the Enterprise plan
Integration with almost all third-party apps is guaranteed due to the popularity and dominance of Google’s apps and services like Chrome and Google search engine.
Uptime: Google has built a network of redundant servers to the point where they don’t need to shut down Gmail or G Suite for maintenance.
Productivity: Google Drive, Google Slides, and Google Docs have become the unofficial industry standard for team collaboration tools in the cloud.

G Suite: The Disadvantages

Unlike Zohomail’s free plan which allows up to five users for free. Gsuite rings in at $6/user per month and this means an organization of 5 people will pay $30/month on the cheapest plan.

3) Office 365 Business Premium

In terms of usage and adoption rates, Microsoft’s Office 365 business email continues to outpace rivals such as Gsuite and Zoho.

This can be chalked up to wide usage of Windows PCs inside small, medium, and large organizations.

Office 365: Plans and pricing

Plans kick off with Office 365 Business Essentials at $5/user per month. Essentials plan comes with team productivity apps like Microsoft teams (Microsoft’s answer to Slack). You also get business email as well as web and mobile versions of Outlook, Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Downloadable desktop apps are not available here.
Office 365 Business Premium rings in at $12.50/user per month and gives you the ability to download Excel, Word, Powerpoint, and Outlook to your desktop for offline use.
The enterprise plan is simply named Microsoft 365 Business and it costs $20/user per month. That $20 bestows on you the privilege to deploy Office apps and set up features and security for users across iOS, Android, and Windows 10.

Office 365: The Advantages

Solid customer service: Once you sign up for one of Office 365’s email plans you can expect solid customer support. If you run into difficulties, help is available via chatbot where you can request to talk to a human being. I’ve had occasions where a customer support technician would call me and remotely troubleshoot things on my account.
Stability and reliability. With a market share of 18% of the global public cloud infrastructure, Microsoft is the second-largest cloud services provider (after AWS) so you can count on their engineering expertise to keep your emails running 99.99% of the time.
Microsoft’s downloadable desktop office apps such as Excel, Powerpoint, Word, and Outlook are feature-rich and remain unmatched by the competition

Office 365: The Disadvantages

The entry-level plan, Office 365 Business, doesn’t come with hosted email for your domain. If you want email hosting for your custom domain then you will have to pony up for the Office 365 Premium Business plan.

4) Icewarp Cloud

If you like Zoho Mail then you might just like Icewarp Cloud.

Icewarp Cloud offers you email hosting bundled together with team collaboration tools such as chat, instant messaging, and web documents.

Icewarp claims to be the only collaboration hub where you can work on one screen.

For example, you can email and chat with remote team members while you all edit and collaborate on the same document in the browser.

Icewarp Cloud: Features and pricing

Lite costs €2.30/user per month giving you 5gig of email storage and 20gig of cloud file storage.
The standard plan sets you back €3.50/user per month and ships with team chat as well as a whopping 100gig of cloud email storage.
The cream of the crop is the Professional plan which costs €6.30/user per month and boasts a beefy 500gig of email storage per user. With Professional you can download Icewarp’s suite of offline desktop apps (think Microsoft Excel, Powerpoint, and Word) for your spreadsheets, presentations, and documents.

Icewarp: The Advantages

Affordable email hosting per user compared to the competition. Only Zohomail works out cheaper than Icewarp Cloud
Icewarp might sound unfamiliar, but they’ve been around since 1999 and have grown organically and through strategic acquisitions. Their customer roster includes big names such as Toyota, Sony, Marriott, and Canon.

Icewarp: The Disadvantages

Icewarp Cloud accepts a minimum of 10 users for any of their email hosting plans. For smaller teams on a budget, this could be a deal-breaker.
Miserly storage for the entry-level (Lite) plan. 5gig storage per user is a little bit on the pinching side. This pricing strategy might be designed to nudge you towards the standard plan ( $3.50/user per month) which rewards you with an ample 100gig of storage per user.

4) Amazon Workmail

Boasting the most extensive global infrastructure of servers, data centers, and availability regions.

Amazon unsurprisingly controls a third (33%) of the world’s cloud computing needs through their AWS arm (Amazon Web Services).

If Amazon experiences downtime, a huge chunk of the internet goes offline too.

Who uses Amazon Web Services?

Netflix, Airbnb, Slack, Pinterest, Trello, Adobe, NASA, and some of the world’s biggest banks and organizations turn to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for storage and computing in the cloud.

For such organizations that need instant availability or are already using some of AWS’ cloud products, it might make sense to host their emails with Amazon Workmail.

Amazon Workmail: Features and pricing

With Workmail, you get basic email hosting plus contact and calendar management.

Pricing is $4/month per user with 50gig of storage. If you need web-based document and spreadsheet editing tools then it’s better to look at Microsoft or Google.

Amazon Workmail: The Advantages

Amazon’s experience in the cloud computing space means you can sleep better knowing your emails are in the hands of the most experienced engineers in the world.
Affordable: At $4/user per month, small companies and large organizations will find Workmail to be cost-effective
Easy to use: Amazon Workmail is bare-bones email hosting without the usual team collaboration tools that competitors offer. The upside is a simple interface that enables you to quickly set up your domain name and start sending or receiving emails.
Generous storage for the price: 50gig of storage per user is more or less in line with what competitors offer.

Amazon Workmail: The Disadvantages

No team collaboration tools are included here. Competitor products such as Zohomail, G Suite, and Office 365 Business Premium all ship with document processing software as well as team collaboration tools.

5) Protonmail

Protonmail offers a haven for customers who demand privacy and security above all else.

Their data centers are nestled in mountainous Switzerland, a country that boasts the strongest and strictest privacy laws in the world.

Who is Protonmail for?

Some of Protonmail’s prominent customers include the White House and Cambridge Analytica.

But Protonmail can be used by anyone who puts their privacy first.

Journalists, whistleblowers, social and political activists, politicians, and dissidents all turn to services like Protonmail to safeguard their lives and interests.

Protonmail features: The Disadvantages

Naturally, Protonmail builds on that privacy trump card with advantages such as

End-to-end encryption: No one, not even Protonmail, can read your emails except you and your recipient.
Self-destructing emails: Worried someone might guess your recipient’s password and access their inbox? Relax because Protonmail offers self-destructing emails that simply expire and self delete after a set time. This means you can determine how long your email will live the moment you hit send.
Privacy: Protonmail is exempt from Swiss data retention laws. Data retention laws in Switzerland require companies to keep records of customers’ emails and phone calls for at least six months. Protonmail is exempt from that which means once you delete your emails in Protonmail they are gone forever.

Protonmail: The Disadvantages

Protonmail was founded in 2013. Compared to Microsoft or Gmail which have been time-tested, Protonmail might need to prove that they will still be around in the next 3-5 years.
Protonmail seems to skimp on storage. The most expensive plan (Visionary plan) hands you only 20gig of storage and is priced at €30/month per user. In that regard, Protonmail might not be the best place to store those huge backups of Wikis and documents.

Protonmail Pricing

Plus plan costs €5/user per month: With this plan, you get 5gig storage space and are limited to 1000 messages per day
Professional for €8/user per month: This plan allows you two custom domains, instead of only one. You get 5gig of storage per user but you’re allowed to send unlimited messages
Visionary from €30/user per month: With the Visionary plan, you can set up to 10 custom domain names, storage increases to 20gig, and just like the Professional plan, there is no cap on daily messages. Visionary also ships with Protonmail’s in-house VPN (ProtonVPN) for additional security.

6) Tutanota

Tutanota is a competitor and strong alternative to Protonmail.

Just like Protonmail, Tutanota’s calling card is private, end-to-end encrypted secure email.

But unlike Protonmail. Tutanota’s data centers are located in Germany, which also boasts strict privacy and data protection laws.

What’s Tutanota mean though?

According to Tutanota’s website. Tutanota is derived from Latin and contains the words “tuta” and “nota” which means “secure message”.

Tutanota: The Advantages

End to end encryption of emails means no one can intercept and read your emails
Germany has no data retention laws which require email providers to store and retain your emails on their servers. This means once you delete an email from your Tutanota inbox, it’s gone forever. It’s not retained or stored in Tutanota’s servers.

Tutanota: The Disadvantages

Tutanota has been around for only 10 years, so there might be legitimate questions about Tutanota’s ability to withstand the test of time.
America’s National Security Agency, the world’s largest mass surveillance agency, has its European headquarters in Germany. Some people might be concerned about the NSA’s presence in Germany.
Even though Germany has very strong data protection laws. Germany signed into law the Communications Intelligence Gathering Act which gives the German government and its security agencies the power to monitor all outgoing and incoming internet traffic.
Storage space for the Premium and Teams plans is sparse. The best way to utilize that measly storage is to regularly delete emails.

Tutanota pricing

Premium plan: Costs €12/user per month and for that you get 1gig of storage plus multiple calendars. No calendar sharing here and customer service is via email.
Teams plan: Costs you €48/user per month and avails 10gig of shared storage. Teams also unlocks shared calendars but customer support is still via email.

7) Rackspace

Rackspace is a good option for enterprise customers who want the following solutions.

Cloud hosting of web applications
Cloud storage
Managed I.T services

Rackspace is no slouch, their market share of the public cloud stands at 3%. But in this review, we will focus on Rackspace’s basic and reseller email hosting plans.

Rackspace white label email reseller hosting

The white label program is a good fit for web design agencies and ISPs that may want to resell hosted email under their branding.

This is a good opportunity for web designers who wish to add value to their design services and subsequently make more money from their existing customers.

Pricing for the email reseller program is available on request.

Rackspace non-white labeled email hosting

If white-labeled email hosting seems like overkill, Rackspace does offer basic (non-white labeled) email hosting starting at $2.99/user per month. With that, you get a

100% uptime guarantee
A generous 25gig of storage per user
Access to your mail via webmail or mobile email clients such as Outlook, Spike, or Mailbird.

Rackspace: The Advantages

Free migration: If you are moving from other hosted email providers, Rackspace will copy and migrate all your emails and attachments for free.
Years of experience. Rackspace started as a web design shop back in 1998, albeit under a different name, but has grown to be a billion-dollar cloud hosting brand. This might serve as an indication that Rackspace will be around for many more years to come.
Affordable basic email plans: Basic cloud-hosted email plans are dirt cheap at $2.99/month per user
Generous storage for the price: For $2.99/user per month you get a 25gig mailbox which for the price, compared to other email providers, should be ample for most users.

Rackspace. The Disadvantages

Whilst Rackspace likes to tout their “fanatical support” levels. Discussions in social forums seem to call out their slow customer support. However, if you possess good sysadmin skills, you might not need support all that much.

8) Mailcheap

Like Rackspace, Mailcheap offers basic managed cloud email hosting and white-labeled reseller email programs.

But rather than following the industry norm of pricing per user, Mailcheap allows you to rent a dedicated or shared server from which you can configure unlimited users, domains, and email addresses.

The only limitation is server specs and resources.

In this article, we will focus on Mailcheap’s white-labeled reseller plans.

With the reseller plans, Mailcheap manages the backend for you and they claim their servers are easy to use for novices or professionals alike

Mailcheap: The Advantages

Pricing is based on the number of servers you deploy, rather than on the number of users on your account. You can rent just a single server or launch hundreds.
For large companies with standalone I.T departments, it makes more sense to rent a server for $30/month and add hundreds (or thousands) of users and domains than paying $10/user per month to Microsoft or Google.

Mailcheap: The Disadvantages

Server management. While Mailcheap promises an easy-to-use or a plug-and-play server management dashboard, you might need technical skills to fully exploit servers and without breaking their limits.

Mailcheap Pricing

Pricing depends on whether you’re getting a dedicated or shared server. The Reseller Enterprise plan costs $30/month and comes with custom branding, 250gig storage, 2gig Ram, and 1 CPU.

9) Atmail

Do you like Mailcheap’s fixed price per server for unlimited users but worry about email server management?

Atmail puts your server management worries to rest by taking the role of a remote I.T department.

So if your organization can’t afford an in-house I.T department to deal with things like spam control parameters, server management, optimization, and server security then Atmail will fill those shoes for you.

Atmail will even manage your email servers whether they are installed locally at your premises or in third-party data centers.

Atmail target customers include Internet service providers (ISPs) as well as web-hosting companies.

Atmail: The Advantages

They handle email migration for you so moving your email accounts is as smooth as possible
Unlimited domain names in your account plus generous storage limits
They handle all I.T duties you can think of so you can worry less about backups, maintenance, security, and software updates.

Atmail: The Disadvantages

While Atmail allows unlimited domains in your account, they will charge based on the number of email accounts you create.

Atmail Pricing

Atmail’s server management plans are available on request

Email has become such a huge part of our daily lives.

And with over 306 billion emails sent and received per day, it’s clear email isn’t going away anytime soon.

Even though the ROI of email marketing continues to outstrip other channels, poor email deliverability and delivery rates remain a huge stumbling block.

Investing in premium email hosting will eliminate most of the challenges that come with emailing and will pay off in a big way.