Email hosting options for Organizations

[mda]

Hi all,

Looking at alternatives from our free legacy gsuite apps which is being retired by google sometime mid this year.

I took a look at this thread and seems like Zoho is a commonly used alternative

https://hardforum.com/threads/email-hosting.2008945/

Would just like to check if you guys would have any other recommendations for an organization with about 75-100 users at this point.

Zoho and 365 Business are at the top of my list, since Microsoft gives us regional pricing of 2.5$ per user

Zoho - Mail Lite - $1.25 per user per month, 10GB of space
MS Business 365 Basic - $2.5 per user per month, 1TB cloud storage, Teams, Office Online / Office web apps
Google is a little further out at $4.2 per month.

Are there anyone else I should be looking at? I'm currently not open to self hosting or running my own email server, but that will be an option in the future when I have the resources to manage it.

Thanks!

Edit: Realized MS Office Online does not allow the opening of offline documents without first uploading to onedrive. Sucks and drains a bit of value from it.

 

[MrGuvernment]

Are you a windows company.. M365 for your organisation and get licensing for everyone and the office suite? Then get people to use OneDrive as a great way to get files off local computers as a form of redundancy.

ya, you cant open something hosted locally on MS hosted apps, unless you have compliance, really no reason not to have your files in MS (onedrive / sharepoint)

Zoho is nice, but they have had some exploits lately with their products.

There is NO reason to host your own email these days, it is just NOT worth it, period. The problems, security around it, redundancy, don't do it and save your self headaches.

if you did host your own mail server dont do it on prem and run it on AWS/Azure/Google cloud as a VPS, but then you may as well just use a PaaS service like Exchange online and save the headaches.

 

[Vengance_01]

O365 for sure

 

[mda]

Thread update: does anyone have experience with bluehost for email? They seem to be very aggressively priced if you get their hosting.

 

[MrGuvernment]

Thread update: does anyone have experience with bluehost for email? They seem to be very aggressively priced if you get their hosting.

From their site they are just using Exchange Online, so just skip them and sign up with M365 ?

 

[mda]

From their site they are just using Exchange Online, so just skip them and sign up with M365 ?

That's what's odd. We do have a bluehost account and we have created more than a few users with them and are still paying the low (fixed) monthly rate.

But then there's the option to use M365 with them (google, too!)

So it does seem that they offer a few different services (their website is a bit unclear on this or I just can't understand it):
1. Bluehost's own internal email services
2. Microsoft 365
3. Google workspace

Option 1 is so much cheaper than the other two. Just looking around to see what the catch is here and why it is so cheap.

 

[SamirD]

It's probably cheaper because it doesn't have the big name and bells and whistles that come with all that. If it's doing the job, I personally wouldn't change it.

 

[mda]

It's probably cheaper because it doesn't have the big name and bells and whistles that come with all that. If it's doing the job, I personally wouldn't change it.

We're currently using it for a domain with about 5-10 users, but am looking to migrate our 100 user domain to it. The worst that can happen is I need to migrate twice but it's going to be hell for about a month... :|

 

[Vengance_01]

If you need to migrate data as well o365 has tools to help automate migration.. I really think your playing with fire

 

[MrGuvernment]

As said bells and whistles, do you use the MS office suite? do you want integration and single sign on abilities and makes people's lives easier as well as all the back end management as well as email filtering and security that can come with an M365 tenant and licensing? Or you just want plain old email hosting?

What are bluehost's backup options, what is their uptime? recovery? audit trails?

it is cheaper for a reason.

 

[mda]

As said bells and whistles, do you use the MS office suite? do you want integration and single sign on abilities and makes people's lives easier as well as all the back end management as well as email filtering and security that can come with an M365 tenant and licensing? Or you just want plain old email hosting?

What are bluehost's backup options, what is their uptime? recovery? audit trails?

it is cheaper for a reason.

If you need to migrate data as well o365 has tools to help automate migration.. I really think your playing with fire

Good points made! Difference in cost just made it hard to ignore I guess.

 

[MrGuvernment]

Ya, cheapest options is not always the best option, but neither is most expensive. This really needs to be a business decision with higher ups included. They need to determine governance of your data.

• Do you need retention?
• What is an acceptable outage period for your business? 5 9's ?
• Are you in an industry that requires auditing?
• How are you currently securing your email? Spam filtering, malicious links et cetera, and do not think you "wont" get hacked, not if but when.
• How do you currently backup email services? And how can you do it going forward?

 

[D-EJ915]

Also keep in mind that shared mailboxes on 365 are 50GB and don't require a license so if you have some "user" mailboxes that don't require a login you can save some money there. Like mrguv said, 365 has great auditing and security tools depending on what your requirements are and has its own email encryption for non-certificate smime users.

Another thing small email hosts can run into sometimes is reputation issues depending on the recipient you could get non-delivery sometimes, may not be the case with this vendor but it can happen.