Looking at replacement for GoDaddy email with same domain usage

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Hi All:

Apparently GoDaddy email has had numerous problems the last few days (and several times this month for us), and we are fed up. My wife’s business uses Thunderbird as our email client, and we want to retain our domain addresses, but move to a different email provider. All GoDaddy has offered is to upgrade to their “Hosted Email Servers” for an additional $420/year (for 4 email-boxes/accounts) vs the “free” included email with our current domain. We’re fine with leaving the domain on GoDaddy, but want to find a less expensive email server provider or hosting that is more reliable and a lot less than $420/yr for just 4-email-boxes. But since this is an established business, we need to retain the “@businessname.com” domain we use.

Any suggestions? Thanx in advance for yours and Merry Xmas to All!

Rob

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If all you’re looking for is hosted email, Rackspace (http://www.rackspace.com) is a great company to deal with. We started with them years ago when they were called webmail.us. They then merged with Mailtrust, then with Rackspace. Customer service has always been excellent.

As you probably know, you will simply move your domain over to them. You can continue to use Thunderbird, or any other email program.

Their webmail interface is excellent as well.

I haven’t dealt with them in a couple of years, but I have no reason to think that they aren’t just as good as before.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Hi Mr.Phelps:

Thanx for the mission-impossible suggestion. I will look into it today. Best wishes.

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The obvious choices would be Office365 -$60/year / user or Gmail. Now there are a lot of hosting providers out there, offering reliable email services for free.

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Hi Ruirib:

No way will I allow ANY Micro$$oft connections to these machines, other than M$$ update. As far as Gmail, I wasn’t aware that I could use that with my existing domain addresses. That is, I thought all Gmail addresses were “username@gmail.com”, but I need to have “username@businessname.com”. Guess I need to look into that some more. Thanx.

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Hi Ruirib:

No way will I allow ANY Micro$$oft connections to these machines, other than M$$ update. As far as Gmail, I wasn’t aware that I could use that with my existing domain addresses. That is, I thought all Gmail addresses were “username@gmail.com”, but I need to have “username@businessname.com”. Guess I need to look into that some more. Thanx.

A lot of well-known services (Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc) offer email hosting.

For email hosting, I personally use Dotster for my personal domain, and my wife uses Rackspace for her company’s domain. No problem with either one, although you’ll probably be cheaper with Dotster for just a few email addresses. I personally feel better sticking with a company who has that as their main purpose. The well-known companies that I mentioned do a lot of information harvesting and reselling, and that’s why I avoid them for my email hosting.

Also, if you want to use imap protocol for your email, make sure they offer it. Both Rackspace and Dotster allow the imap protocol.

This message will self destruct in 10 seconds!

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Thanx for the tip on Dotster. I’ll look into them shortly.

Best wishes.

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Hi Ruirib:

No way will I allow ANY Micro$$oft connections to these machines, other than M$$ update. As far as Gmail, I wasn’t aware that I could use that with my existing domain addresses. That is, I thought all Gmail addresses were “username@gmail.com”, but I need to have “username@businessname.com”. Guess I need to look into that some more. Thanx.

That’s your choice to make :). Personally, I would use Microsoft over Google anytime without even blinking.

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Hi Ruirib:

Good point. I’m not anxious to use GMail, either, for the same reason. I’ve been looking at Rackspace, and it looks like a very good possibility to me.

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I use Fastmail for almost all my mail. Cheap, reliable and feature rich.

cheers, Paul

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Thanxs for the tip, Paul. I’ll look into Fastmail shortly.

Cheers.

Rob

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Hi All:

Thanx to you all for your suggestions. Here’s what I found:

1) Our existing GoDaddy account was running a little under $50/yr for up to 100/2GB email addresses (we use just 4-5 at the moment)
2) Dotster was, far and away, the least expensive alternative — $0.99/month for up to 10 email addresses — but too inexpensive for us to trust…
3) FastMail was close on the cost (quoted $15/yr per email address (500MB) x 4, plus $15 “business management fee” – $75/yr overall for us) – but it’s foreign-based (Australia), so not desirable in case of problems.
4) RackSpace looked to be my choice — its $2/month for 25GB per email account, and they offer a one-time “assisted migration” for $10/box or “self migration” at $5/box, but they have an extensive on-line support presence and blog/forum.
5) We ignored Gmail, Yahoo (with its own serious problems all the last week), Micro$$oft, etc. to avoid privacy invasion issues.

Note also: We intend to stick with POP3 and avoid IMAP, so that we can always access past emails locally, even if the email servers are off-line. We back up often enough that that isn’t an issue for us.

Now that things have settled out with GoDaddy at present, my partner (wife) has decided that unless it goes South again soon that “everyone has bad days so we will stick with what we have for now.”

So that’s the scoop for the time being. Thanx again to everyone for your helpful suggestions and recommendations.

Merry Xmas to all!

Rob

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Hi All:

Apparently GoDaddy email has had numerous problems …

I echo the problems with GoDaddy’s email service. We’ve been using GoDaddy to host our business web site and email service for the past year and for the past couple months I’ve been getting complaints from various staff about not receiving emails. I’ve only recently been able to prove it. I have an old business email account with our local ISP and have it auto forwarding to my current account. I’ve had a couple of regular senders send their messages to both addresses. All were getting to the old address but some were not arriving at the new address and some were not auto forwarding although the ISP says they left their server. GoDaddy’s forum shows numerous people with same problem and none appeared to be getting any satisfaction from GoDaddy. Our solution is to move our web hosting and email service from GoDaddy to our local ISP. Starting the process for that now. Our domain is registered elsewhere so once everything is set up with the ISP, we just have to arrange for the DNS pointing to the right place. Local hosting will cost a little more but still not bad for a business but at least there’s some peace of mind that if there is a problem, we have someone local to complain to!

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If the situation arises once again, you might also consider looking at Arvixe (arvixe.com — what a surprise!). It might or might not be more expensive if you’re not doing any hosting, but a hosting account includes one free domain for life. Do note that their terminology is misleading; the terms “personal” and “business” refer to account size, not usage. I have my business with them using a so-called “personal” plan (at their suggestion).

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