In this article, I talk about the best email hosting providers and how to choose the right option for you.

Email hosting refers to a service when a separate email server is rented for sending and receiving messages. But having a separate server for email and website hosting can increase the pricing quite a lot.

I admit it, premium email hosting services are great – easy to use and very reliable. For a price, of course. And while general recommendations don’t advise on trusting your hosting provider with your emails as well, I have a pretty different opinion.

Why’s that?

Well, if you’re just getting started, budgets are often tight. Why would you want to spend up to $15/mo for each additional mailbox when hosting providers offer that for free?

Also, if you’re using a reliable provider, it will offer anti-spam protection as well as all the security measures. There’s no need to worry about your emails getting blocked by someone on the server sending spam.

Last but not least, if you’re not planning to launch huge email marketing campaigns, what’s the need for fancy email hosting services?

Personally, I rarely sign up for paid email hosting so I’ve used tons of email services offered by hosts throughout the years. This way, I only pay for the hosting of my site and email accounts come complimentary.

At the same time, there’s a couple of things to look for and look out for. What are these things?

Choosing a Good Email Hosting Service
A number of things are involved in good email hosting. That’s security and privacy, storage, and configurations among others.

Before sticking to a provider, consider this:

Security and data privacy
Hosting a website together with mailboxes requires strong security measures. A big set of rules and terms when purchasing a provider does not always limit you. In this case, it means the more protected servers. If your provider restricts adult content, does not tolerate spam and scam – there’s less chance that you’ll feel the negatives of hosting email on the same server.

Additionally, look for DDoS protection, spam filters, and of course – strong backup and recovery protocols.

Generous storage limits
I rarely keep my mailboxes as clean as a fresh snowfall. There are often lots of promotional emails that remain unopened going on. So don’t trust your employees to clean up their emails regularly.

Simply look for a provider that offers big allowances on the mailbox size.

Because emails are one of the fastest and the most reliable ways of communication, files are being sent all the time. But what’s the point when you cannot attach a document or an image?

Look for a provider that has big allowances on attachment sizes. 25MB is considered an average and 50MB is a golden standard.

Email configurations
SMTP, POP, IMAP should ring a bell – these are the main email protocols of how you’ll send, receive, and store emails. All of them offer their benefits and drawbacks. And all or at least one should be supported by your hosting provider.

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is a standard and very similar to HTTP – all hosts have to include it.
POP (Post Office Protocol) is a client-server protocol. Using it, you can save a lot of server resources as email management takes place in the email client rather than the server. Drawback – you lose the option to sync.

IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is another client-server protocol that saves all the data in the server with info like replies or reads.

Based on your preferences and personal goals, you may want to choose one or another protocol.

So now, take a look at the list to see who offers what.