This is a guest post by Jesse Petersen. Jesse has been using WordPress since 2005 and has seen it grow from something clunky and incredibly geeky into something that deserves the 15%-22% of all sites choose as their platform. It’s an incredible piece of software that has very few limitations when developed by an expert. Jesse is one of those experts.
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As I started moving my clients to WP Engine last year, I had to come up with some way of keeping domain e-mail going for those who had it on my previous host. I tried two cloud solutions (atmailcloud and ZoHo) and found that setup to be more than what my clients wanted.
What to do for domain e-mail is a big challenge for consultants who are moving their clients over to any of the managed WordPress hosting providers. As part of WP Engine’s specialization in hosting only WordPress, WP Engine doesn’t have e-mail inboxes – only SMTP capabilities for notifications.
So what are you supposed to do with your email if you’re used to a hosting company providing that service? How can you optimize both your WordPress hosting provider, AND your email? The goal should be to make sure your email provider is as good as your WordPress provider.
Through the years, people have done a few things to get domain e-mail. Here are the three most popular:
- GoDaddy inboxes – For years, I’ve groaned that people were paying for e-mail. I’d never paid for e-mail and many people were complaining that mail was getting lost.
- Hosting inboxes – Most cPanel hosts provide unlimited inboxes at no additional cost, as do VPS and dedicated boxes. I used hosting inboxes for the past decade, at no cost, as did most of my clients, even if they were just forwarding addresses.
- Google Apps – What was once free is now only available for $50 / user annually. In addition to reliability and rich features, the other great thing about Google Apps is that the mail is completely separate from the hosting, so you’re free to move hosting without the additional steps or e-mail downtime associated with changing the domain nameservers. Switching hosts with this setup just means changing the IP address in the domain A record.
To see which I liked best, I decided to try out the e-mail products my domain registrar offered. I started moving my domains from GoDaddy to Hover in June 2012 and those sites didn’t go down when GoDaddy DNS went down for a few hours in the fall, so I started offering those transfers to my clients when their domains were set to renew. (I provided them with a 10% off coupon code HONEST to sweeten the deal.)
They also offer very nice bulk discounts to every inbox (not forwarding addresses) that make it more attractive to cost-conscious consumers, but even 1 Classic inbox is only $20, which is 1/3 the cost of Google Apps and a forwarding address is 1/12th the price of Google Apps at $5/yr.
Most of my clients aren’t too cheap to not use Google Apps, but there’s a lot less setup involved to add a new “Send As” account to Gmail than there is to setting up Google Apps. Time is money, too, so this is what I’m going with for myself and my clients who don’t already have a free or paid Google Apps account(s). I like to subject myself to the same services as my clients, so I’m also using it on 2 websites – one forwarding and one mailbox. I’ve got no issues or complaints whatsoever.
Have you made the switch to a service like Hover? How do you like it so far? What other solutions are you offering for your WPE-hosted sites’ domain e-mail?
There are still two great free options. We use the first – outlook.com for your domain (see domains.live.com) – easy to set up, uses our own domains just like Google Apps did, and personally I like the outlook.com interface much better. Zoho is also a great option, and its free for up to three users.
I think that hover is a needed domain registrar for many people great addition to many e-mail systems out there that people can use help when setting up DNS records. I use PairNic or Dyn as a registrar and have found them both very helpful as far as e-mail.
I think for instance personally if someone wants to pay no money at all and needs e-mail ZoHo is the best deal going for free Email Outlook.com offers the ability to host POP3 mail in a great user interface for no cost at all. you can also get free hosted Zimbra e-mail at the link below
http://www.mrmail.com/free-zimbra-hosting/
I have always liked Google apps and how configurable with other products it is I believe it is worth the money.
I also have clients that when they 1st come to me had yet to understand the benefits of having your e-mail hosted by someone other than your web host when I say that I’m talking about the person who uses their a record and c name e-mail however they seem to be happy when I explained exactly why you would not want to use your IP address for your Web server to host your e-mail.
A have only seen atmailcloud advertised for $2 a box. However I personally use Peer1/server beach Microsoft exchange you can get one mailbox of 25 gigs for $10 month or you can opt for the smaller box for $4 a month. The same is true rack space e-mail at $2 a mailbox for 25 GB space is hard to beat. Combining that the ability to hybrid that with their hosted exchange 25 gigs at $10 a box. the advantage Peer1/ server Beach and rack space give companies a fantastic choice between paying separate amounts depending on the needs of the user without affecting the MX records for the domain something sometimes taken for granted.
I believe however if you need more than 3 mailboxes for free when you consider aliases art infinite. you may want to have a mail service that you pay for because your most likely accompany and will want to have the e-mail uptime at hundred percent in addition to 24/7 support.
I also want to say believe the fuse mail at $2 a mailbox for 10 gigs as well.
I hope this helps potential WPEngine customers the comfort in knowing you are upgrading your website & your Email.
I have been there and done that with email much like your experience above Jesse. We setup Google Apps for every man and there horse during ‘the free years’ and really had to stop and reconsider once they started charging.
The verdict – sole operators or just a small business I would say up to $150 (3 email accounts) is very do-able. Over this amount you should start looking at other services but for reliability, interlinked services, SPAM filtering and other wonderful google goodness – I can’t fault Google sorry to say.
We do however host domains with one provider, websites with another (mainly wpengine) and email with a third so we have some redundancy in the system and outages can be rerouted easily.
I use Rackspace Email for this purpose. It rocks!
They might have good email but their hosting sux. At least in my experience. Their team asked me to use a caching plugin with my WordPress site, FTW? I shouldn’t need one like with WP Engine.
Tony
thnx for the suggestion. that wpengine does not even provide email forwarding is a big time sink for me. as a result, i am still paying dreamhost, and basically, i am hosting email with dreamhost and sites with wpengine, which to me, feels like a silly setup.
in correspondence with wpengine, their stance was “you don’t even know how much of a burden hosting email really is…” ok, i understand that. but it really does put “all of us” in really tough spot.
our clients expect email to be a part of their deal. in migrating to wpengine, it can wind up coming out of our costs to figure out what to do with email, if our clients are “old clients” from “back when” email was included with everything everywhere.
i also have a super cheap host, and some of my emails go through that host. that email goes down from time to time and is not very reliable and it costs $2.50/month.
i really don’t want to pay google for email. it’s like we’ve been “set up,” and well — the invasive “we know everything about you” situation — makes me not want to pay them any more cash directly than i do when i run adwords.
so i feel stuck.
i can just pay google — but it feels like extortion and i don’t want my emails read, searched, scanned, etc.
i can try some other service but what if i don’t like that service? then i need to switch?
and really — i just want to use my regular ole mail program — and read and reply to email. and that is what my clients want. they don’t want me to pitch them on zoho when they are already fine with using Outlook.
Hey Dainis, we stand by our decision to focus exclusively on providing an awesome WordPress hosting solution, and instead encourage clients to utilize the services of other application-specific service providers for things like email services.
In many respects your email service is probably as important if not more important to you/your clients than your/their web-presence. As such if it’s unreliable and unavailable then I would offer for consideration that that’s actually a very expensive price to pay.
I can’t think of an email service provider that is providing more innovation and has better uptime than Google Apps, and at $5/m per account it really doesn’t feel like extortion to me. We love using and paying for Google Apps for email here at WP Engine, and seeing as paid Google Apps doesn’t have advertising within it I don’t believe Google is doing anything to “scan” emails in the way they must do for “free” ad-supported GMail accounts.
We also love Zoho Mail as an alternative, and it’s worth pointing out that Zoho Mail can be configured to work with Outlook – https://www.zoho.com/mail/help/outlook-imap-access.html.
We have also endured this too. It really depends on the clients business model. How they operate, what their archival needs are and of course the all important cost factor weighted against the ROI?
For the most part Go-Daddy is a NO-GO…the only thing we use GD for now is Domain Names.
ZoHo – not sure what issues you experienced….but this is our main go to for cost conscious clients. We primarily set them up as POP accounts…less hassle…however, there is NO CS from ZoHo on these FREE accounts and clients know this.
I have a few that want ACCESS via IMAP on the go to ALL their Email in outlook. That’s a PAID fee at ZoHo for storage about 24 Bucks a year…and you do get some service.
RackSpace: If you need a Power Horse and Rock Solid Reliability for IMAP email support….we have a Few clients here too…the CS is excellent… They get what they pay for…..these are all set-up as Direct Bill to my clients so they can manage that aspect themselves. Most pay me an annual retainer to take occasional service calls on these types of issues.