Hey guys! Welcome to my blog, where I like to talk about getting online, building websites, and building a brand. So today I'm going to be talking about email hosting.
Custom email hosting. How do you get that custom email for your domain name, how much does it cost, is it worth it, and where is the best place to get it?
So if you're building out your brand as a freelancer, or content creator, or business. One of the first things you're likely looking into after getting a website is a custom email. This can be something like info@yourbusiness.com, or hello@yourname.com. Now while custom email like this looks awesome, you may be wondering if it's practical and affordable for where you're at in your branding journey. I'm here to tell you that it makes a big difference in how professional your brand appears, and it doesn't have to be expensive.
Now the email hosting, I personally use and recommend for all of my brands is Namecheap's Private Email Hosting. The particular plan I use is the private plan. And it costs only $9.88 per year for an email. Now this price is for the first email inbox you create. Additional email inboxes will cost you $2.98 per year per inbox. So what does this mean? Let's say you want to have sales@mycompany.com, and support@mycompany.com, as two separate inboxes. Basically functioning as two emails. To do this you would pay $12.86 per year total for both email accounts. And then for each additional email account you add, you would add on $2.98 per year, per email. So as you can see, Namecheap's Private Email Hosting is very affordable and is essentially the price of one domain name per year. It's also important to note that you can have one alias per inbox. Meaning you could have help@mycompany.com forward to support@mycompany.com. And that's included in the cost. Now you can also set up what's called a catch-all-inbox. And that's where any imaginary made up email someone might type will filter down to one inbox. Somebody could literally type youarestupid@mycompany.com. And with the catch-all feature enabled it would forward to support@mycompany.com or whatever the appropriate inbox is.
Now as far as reliability goes private email hosting is rock solid. I can think of one time in the three years using the service where there were just a few hours of downtime and I couldn't check my email. But generally speaking, I don't ever have a problem. So the pricing and reliability are attractive. But is the email easy to set-up? And what does the interface look like where you check your email? As far as the set-up process goes, if you had your domain registered at Namecheap the process is going to be very simple and easy. Click this link for register on Namecheap.
Now if you have your domain registered with someone else, it's still possible to use Namecheap's Private Email Hosting. And it's still simple and easy to set-up. But there are just a few more steps to work through. I've set it up both with domains at Namecheap, and with domains outside of Namecheap and both times I would say it's pretty easy to set up. Now let’s talk about the interface. Because knowing where and how to check your email is important, and it's definitely a factor when you're shopping for email hosting. Namecheap's Private Email Hosting uses an online software called Open-Xchange for you to check your email. It's a relatively basic and intuitive interface that works on desktop and mobile. Now while the included online email service that Namecheap gives you is certainly a decent way to check your email, I wouldn't recommend it. It's definitely not up to the standards of an email service like Gmail. And I personally link my Namecheap private email accounts to a mail client. For Mac, iOS, and Android I recommend Spark which is free. And for Windows users I recommend Mailbird which is also free. These apps basically let you enter the details of your email address and then check your email through the app instead of online. Okay so generally speaking I've been pretty positive about private emails so far. And that's because I've had a good experience with it. But let’s talk about who private email isn't a fit for.
Now if you're an entrepreneur, content creator, small business, or anyone building a brand I would highly recommend private email hosting. If however, you're a large corporation, or someone with a large team, or someone who's going to require more than the three gigabytes of storage on the smallest private email plan. I would recommend seeking out alternative options such as G Suite. While private email does offer higher plans with more storage options, the value for the price becomes dramatically lower. And at the higher price point of the more expensive private email hosting plans, something like G-Suite or hosting from Microsoft Outlook starts to become a better idea. Now in case you're wondering, G Suite is Google's email hosting solution and will give you the ability to have the quality email services Gmail provides while having it on your own custom domain name. G Suite also bring other benefits like 30 gigabytes of Google Drive space, and access to Google Docs, Google Sheets and more. Now G Suite is $5 per month, per inbox, or $50 per year, per inbox. So it definitely adds up and I wouldn't recommend it for the average person. Exploring their pricing model; that means if you wanted three separate inboxes, you would have to pay $15 per month or $50 per year for email hosting. And that is expensive when you're a small guy and you're just getting started. I used G Suite for a few months and I did really like the service it provided. But I ultimately ended up switching back to private email hosting for the amazing value it offers. Now the only other downside I can find to private email hosting, is that it doesn't two factor authentication. This kind of bothers me because I have two factor authentication enabled on absolutely every account that supports it. And having a secure email is incredibly important. After all if someone hacks your email, they literally have access to all of your accounts by resetting passwords, and clicking the links that get sent to your email. So for that reason I use a very strong randomly generated password for all of my private email accounts, and store them in LastPass, and I've not had a problem so far.
So in the end, if you're an entrepreneur, content creator, or small business owner, I would definitely recommend giving Namecheap's Private Email Hosting a shot. They offer a two month free trial, so you might as well give it a try.
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