Email & Web Hosting

warhawk wrote: ↑ I am sure this topic has been beaten to death, but a search didn't quite answer my question.

So I have started a consulting business and am looking for Mail and Web Hosting. Currently using gSuite, but since i am not actively working on this currently, i was looking for more cost effective solution as the emails are next to nothing curentlly. I also considered ZOHO but don't have much feedback on it.

Is there a more cost effective email option. Currently i am not expecting too many emails and since i have a domain, i figure i use the [email protected] email vs a gmail account.

Would appreciate the feedback.

at87on wrote: ↑ The most cost effective solution IMO is the following:
Free e-mail forwarding with your registrar.

Most domain name registrars offer free e-mail forwarding.

So [email protected] can be forwarded to any email address of your choice, including Gmail eg: [email protected]

With G-mail, you can add aliases so that when you send out e-mail messages from your Gmail app (smartphone), or via the browser (computer), it will be sent from [email protected].


Who is your domain name registrar?

1. setup a gmail for business if you don't already have one.
2. setup a email forwarding with your registrar's control panel [email protected] => email in step 1.
3. go into gmail settings > accounts & import > Send mail as > Add another email address follow the steps.

Scote64 wrote: ↑ Why don't you just move to a standard cpanel hosting service? There are lots of bargain options available for as little as $20/year. The learning curve to set up your email and web hosting is fairly easy, and it's so standard and widespread that there is ample advice available on every topic. Easily portable to any other similar service, so it's basically a commodity service with very competitive pricing. You can even afford to have a backup hosting service, and it only takes a few hours delay to switch your domain to point to the backup in case of serious issues.

at87on wrote: ↑ Zoho free sucks IMO.
You'll have to use their mail app to get the best out of the free service.

warhawk wrote: ↑ Could you point me to a good option please. Is spam filtering decent on the cPanel hosting ?

warhawk wrote: ↑ The domain is currently with NameSilo. Great idea on the steps above. I could do the above. I suppose I can have essentially multiple emails to a common mailbox.

Scote64 wrote: ↑ The best prices vary over time as sales come and go. With Black Friday / Cyber Monday coming up, you should wait until then and see what's on offer.

I currently use Buyshared, which is available for as little as US$8/yr, but currently not taking new customers. And I use Stablehost, where I have an account that includes domain name and web hosting for a perpetual price of $22/yr. You just have to wait for the good sales.

All of these services employ some sort of spam blocking, and they allow you to add your own custom rules. They say that with something like 95% of email being spam, they would be overwhelmed if they didn't use spam blockers. Nevertheless I find that Gmail's spam blocker is a little better, so what I do is forward all the email to a free Gmail account and pick it up from there by POP access after Gmail has filtered it. One caution about doing this: the spam blocking services used by web hosters (such as the notoriously dumb-as-a-rock Mailchannels.net) may falsely identify your account as originating spam when you relay it to Gmail for filtering, so you have to turn that around and get Gmail to pull the messages from your hosting account by polling, which involves a short delay.

at87on wrote: ↑ I used to be a very high on buyshared, but because they oversell their shared hosting, they have a lot of spammers resulting into their IPs getting constantly blacklisted (causing email delivery issues).

Scote64 wrote: ↑ I think that's a criticism regularly leveled at almost every web hosting service.

I haven't found the more expensive services to be any better.

As for Buyshared, I've had that account about 18 months now, and I haven't seen any performance problems or blacklisting problems. They do shut off new customer signups regularly, so I assume they are trying to avoid overselling - I haven't seen any other web hosting service do that. My only complaint with them is that they had a >24 hr service outage caused by a single hardware failure.

at87on wrote: ↑ I migrated over to CrocWeb -- much better performance since their servers are in Montreal vs. BuyShared being in Las Vegas (most of my target audience is Ontario).

The performance difference is definitely noticeable.

diamontree123 wrote: ↑ I use Zoho email. It was super easy to setup and costs only $12 per year just for professional email. For website, I use AWS. Go AWS lightsail if you want traditional WordPress deployment quickly. Cost is around 4-5$. If its a static site, you can use S3 bucket and may be a lambda function to setup "Contact Us" email part . This option will cost you few dimes a month if traffic is low. Just don't use AWS EC2 based solution as it will be very expensive. AWS also sells domain name so it can be an almost one stop solution. Google cloud is another good alternative. I used cPanel quite a bit but after using Amazon for its speed and flexibility, I won't go back.