Email hosting worth my money?

Z

zerodamage

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 18, 2007
Messages
171
I have a couple of new domains and one of them needs email hosting. With Google Apps going paid for domains, I am looking at alternatives. Any recommendations? This is for a business I am starting up on my own. Thanks!
 
If you've registered at Gandi.net you get hosting for free...
You're in US? Microsoft Exchange Online isn't bad and is cheap too.
//Danne
 
There are times when I get really tempted to just move my stuff to someone else's hosted solution instead of doing it myself. It would make my life easier.
 
I moved my email to fastmail after years of hosting my own MX and forwarding to Yahoo. I wish I had done it sooner; it's so nice to have a company whose sole purpose is email handling my email instead of using email as a way to get my eyeballs. I had decided to ditch Yahoo (and had no desire to use Google after using it at work), and decided it would be better to pay someone a reasonable amount vs setting up an IMAP server with replication etc.
 
I would set up my own email server if it weren't so overly complicated. I would use Gandi.net but you cannot transfer domains within the first 60 days of registration.
 
I've been using Zoho for several months now--probably almost a year--and it does well (especially for free). The only problem I have occasionally is that the IMAP client sometimes disconnects, and if I know I'm getting an email and it doesn't come through sometimes I have to log into the web interface. I use Outlook at home, and it works noticeably better with my Gmail account.
 
Email is a pain. I host my own, but I'd hate to manage other people's. At least not for the peanuts that you'd have to charge to stay competitive. In fact hosting as a whole is a huge pain. I considered it, but looking at the prices, which I don't even know how they afford to operate at, it's just impossible to compete. How the hell can companies afford to give people 900TB with unlimited bandwidth for $5/year? Most server providers want like 200/mo just to add another 2TB hard drive.

A single person decides to send spam or something that someone thinks is spam, and boom your entire IP block is on every RBL and then you get complains that nobody can send email. Then have to fight with each RBL to convince them that it will never happen again, and if it does they may refuse to take it off.

I have the occasional mass mail I need to send to my forum members and even that I've been considering of outsourcing, so I don't have to deal with the RBLs.
 
We do Exchange hosting for some of our MSP clients, but for non-MSP clients we typically put them on Intermedia Hosted Exchange. The price isn't too bad and the uptime has been great. Pretty easy to manage too.

If you're a DIYer, then look at Citadel.org. That may cover your needs without paying Exchange and Windows licensing.

Regardless of your email choice, pay DNSMadeEasy to manage you name servers and also do Mail Backup services. If your primary MX server goes down, their secondary MX sites queue your email until the primary site is online again. Good for outages and not letting people see the bouncebacks.
 
Setting up exchange 2010 is easier than you think.

Postfix is pretty easy also.
 
zerodamage said:
I would set up my own email server if it weren't so overly complicated. I would use Gandi.net but you cannot transfer domains within the first 60 days of registration.
Click to expand...

it isn't complicated, but you need to worry about up time and speed and accessibility, backups and so on..

everyone.net is what i have used for years and love it! No reason to host your own email these days, unless you are super paranoid about someone else having all your emails.
 
Microsoft-hosted Exchange 365

You won't regret it at 4 USD per month per user account.
 
Cerulean said:
Microsoft-hosted Exchange 365

You won't regret it at 4 USD per month per user account.
Click to expand...

Yea I'd personally go this route(or other exchange based systems if you want some more control over anti spam or more features).

I've had clients that run imap for years on and off and they are always amazed at how much better exchange is.

With a static ip you can host your own stuff but email can be a pain in the ass. Hosted exchange gives you some nice features and you don't have to do much other than use it.
 
Cerulean said:
Microsoft-hosted Exchange 365

You won't regret it at 4 USD per month per user account.
Click to expand...

So you've got a bunch of, let's say ~210 efaxs or printers on your network. They'd technically want a licensed mailbox per instance for those ~210 devices, right? If you are the honest sort and play by rules, it'll cost you about $10,000 year for the privilege to interact with email that you used to get free. That's craziness, you don't run a mail server locally because you're all about saving money! So you opt to configure those devices to relay through smtp.office365.com just like their documentation says it supports.

But you don't want to use a single named account to do the sending because...... well you have a few crew members on staff and you want more than just a single pair of eyeballs on any replies because the replies might become politically charged. And you also don't want to have go clean out an unmonitored mailbox.

So you create a mail enabled distribution group of say, [email protected] and commence testing.

Your tests discover hmmm, can't seem to authenticate to O365 unless a named/licensed O365 account is used.

So you plug in some credentials for [email protected] to "connect" to O365 and pass these messages. But low and behold, O365 5.5.7 rejects those send attempts claiming [email protected] does not have permission to send as [email protected].

Errr ok... no problem, you think.... you'll just turn off 'RequireSenderAuthenticationEnabled' for that DG. No... wait... then you'll eventually be spammed on your DG. Ok, ok, you'll just grant "Send As" permission on [email protected] for [email protected]. Oh... hmm... there.... doesn't.... seem..... to be..... a way.... to do this simple "Send As" thing in their cloudy offering.


This may or may not be a fictional scenario. I'm curious to see screen shots of your ability to grant 'send as' on a DG.
 
If you can't figure out how to roll your own, pay someone else to do your job for you.
 
vr.

How much a year would it take you to run an in house exchange
  • Windows License / CAL's
  • Exchange LIcense / CAL's
  • Spam protection of some sort
  • Power
  • Server
  • I.T who can run it / trouble shoot it
  • backups
  • Internet to handle the load

Sure you could run postfix and cut the cost way down but now you loose most of the functionality which Exchange provides and excel's at in a business environment.
 
mwarps said:
If you can't figure out how to roll your own, pay someone else to do your job for you.
Click to expand...

Not a matter of not having figured it out. It's just a lot of overhead for a solo consultant with all the travel and kids to maintain. I also don't have a static IP so that is another factor.

It's a pain in the ass.

I decided to use a 2-month free trial of NameCheap's hosted email. Not too bad but haven't much used it yet.
 
MrGuvernment said:
vr.

How much a year would it take you to run an in house exchange
  • Windows License / CAL's
  • Exchange LIcense / CAL's
  • Spam protection of some sort
  • Power
  • Server
  • I.T who can run it / trouble shoot it
  • backups
  • Internet to handle the load

Sure you could run postfix and cut the cost way down but now you loose most of the functionality which Exchange provides and excel's at in a business environment.
Click to expand...

Actually, I don't think I would deploy Exchange into a new environment if given a choice. I'd pick something else based on several reasons. There are more but these came to mind quickly.

Price being the discussion here, Microsoft has priced themselves off my radar.

2500 users at $77.99 each is $194,975, one time. I'll say for 7 years because we truly did stay on one platform for more than 7 years. And yes I do realize I didn't factor in the server software price, OS price, etc but we're staying high level.

2500 users at O365 at $4/mo x 12/mo as quoted by Cerulean is $120,000. But I get to pay that each year for 7 years. At $840,000 as a portion of my FTE duties I would be keeping it in house.

The market has progressed enough that Exchange is no longer a requirement, it's kind of become a lazy answer to collaboration efforts and the cost plus complexity outweigh the value.

Microsoft themselves tried to kill some of its collaboration attraction and force people to adopt SharePoint (which sucks). Public outcry and pushback from their large enterprise customers has delayed that but we might see them finally gone in the next release. Meanwhile they've since killed their integrated mail solution for the small businesses. They've killed off /Hosting Mode from v2010. They released 2007 and 2010 with many of the UI features left to PowerShell-foo making it harder for smaller shops to win new sales, obviously O365 fills that void. They killed TechNet for IT pro's to learn and advocate for their products with only rumors circulating that piracy was to blame (yet universities and msdn are equally pirated. Never mind the detail that if it were piracy it was never addressed their anti-piracy system is flawed and all 3 use the same). The last flag for me was personally hearing an Exchange product manager say at a TechEd Microsoft develops for their cloud first before considering an on-prem. I won't go any further than that since it quickly turns philosophical. You can PM me if you want to continue that discussion.

Several other products have evolved and are very usable / drop in ready. I've used others but like this one at the moment.
http://kolab.org/about
 
I'm actually surprised there arn't more viable exchange alternatives. While it is a good product and I don't think anything really compares, the price is just completely absurd. The whole per user pricing scheme is ridiculous too, on top of per server/user licensing for the actual OS itself. Everything stacks, it's insane. Add Citrix to the mix for the Outlook client as some companies do that, and you're paying per user twice (RDP + Citrix license), again. Imagine if every day objects were priced that way. Pay $35,000 for a car, then pay $10 for each km driven, per passenger. Add another $5 per passenger per km if the road is paved.

If I was running my own company I'd probably go DIY route just to save all that money. Might cost a lot of time at first but once the solution is perfected it's only tweaks and fixes that need to be made... typical stuff no matter what solution you use. In fact an in house solution would be better in the long term. Instead of having an upgrade cycle where you need to migrate stuff and overall turn into a huge project, you just keep updating it for your needs and as long as it's coded well so it's not platform dependant too much an OS upgrade would not be a big deal. When a trouble ticket comes in instead of having to deal with trying to figure out why a piece of proprietary closed source software is acting a certain way, your programmers debug and fix it.
 
@Red Squirrel

I've heard that Citrix (when priced right) bundles their license in with the TS license. I've also heard many shops don't realize this and effectively pay for it twice. This info came from a Citrix VAR after our shop paid for them twice from other vendors. I didn't manage the purchases so I couldn't tell you how it actually bills.
 
vr. said:
.


This may or may not be a fictional scenario. I'm curious to see screen shots of your ability to grant 'send as' on a DG.
Click to expand...
we have an in-house Exchange 2013 with CU3 and I've never seen the Send As delegation work for distribution lists :( there are other issues that seem to be quite bothersome to me but I think it is probably related to not running the latest CU7 and very possibly that our deployment wasn't executed properly/cleanly.

I use Exchange 365 for my personal email and it is better than IMAP all the way. Until Google offers something that is equally or more reliable and extensive, I'm set with Microsoft's service.

I'm not an expert on Exchange so I haven't much two say other than that all options should be considered and research thoroughly accomplished. POP3 is such a POS to deal with when unfixable problems occur and users complain. IMAP seems to EB a one way street when it comes to Calendar and Contacts (I'm thinking Google Apps / Ice Warp / other). Exchange takes the best of both worlds and combines it into one. It all depends on how much your company values this.

I would like to hear of competitive alternatives that are in essence the same where "the best of both POP3 and IMAP" are combined or at the least how other organizations deal with it without using Exchange. At another company that I work at, we use Google Apps and everyone is setup as IMAP. POP3 is such a POS that I don't support it in our infrastructure. Yet even with IMAP there are still downsides like not being able to sync contacts and calendar back to Google through IMAP protocol as a native function. Learned this the hard way when I cleaned a former employee's Outlook and Thunderbird profiles. Users at this facility have accepted the limitations of IMAP and understand why I don't support POP3 (small business with low headcount).
 
Obviously this depends on amount of users as others have said, it's simply not worth it if its just a few clients. Hosting public network services such as web-/email-servers to require quite a bit of attention [Bif[/B] you want to do it right and keep up with all the security, spam issues etc that pops up over time. You should have backup systems in place (both data and services) so it's quite a bit of work. Zimbra is a nice suite if you want everything but as with Horde it's not very easy to maintain and if it breaks it's hard to troubleshoot.
//Danne
 
Cerulean said:
I would like to hear of competitive alternatives that are in essence the same where "the best of both POP3 and IMAP" are combined or at the least how other organizations deal with it without using Exchange. At another company that I work at, we use Google Apps and everyone is setup as IMAP. POP3 is such a POS that I don't support it in our infrastructure. Yet even with IMAP there are still downsides like not being able to sync contacts and calendar back to Google through IMAP protocol as a native function. Learned this the hard way when I cleaned a former employee's Outlook and Thunderbird profiles. Users at this facility have accepted the limitations of IMAP and understand why I don't support POP3 (small business with low headcount).
Click to expand...

A good bit of the competitive alternatives emulate exchange. So phones will connect via active-sync and will have an outlook plugin or use mapi to connect to it. Some will have their own email client. In many cases you pay extra for this over the stock.

I'd say someone really needs to come up with a true replacement that doesn't just emulate exchange but it would be a very big project. You need something that can take out outlook and for most stuff like thunderbird just isn't as good. It needs a very good web interface. It does need to emulate activesync for phones although having its own system that they can try to push to the phone vendors would help them not having to follow any changes MS makes.
 
Yes way to much work, time and downside when you have a problem to host your own on a small scale.
Security issue and someone starts sending spam out?

Be prepared to get blacklisted and loose outgoing email you sent.
 
smangular said:
Yes way to much work, time and downside when you have a problem to host your own on a small scale.
Security issue and someone starts sending spam out?

Be prepared to get blacklisted and loose outgoing email you sent.
Click to expand...
That's what salesforce.com is for :D
 
How many accounts do you need? Can you live with aliases vs. actual inboxes? I would use Google Apps if you were already using it or Office 365.
 
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