eMail Hosting Options - Advice Sought

nheather

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I currently have a hosting service with Dataflame.

On paper it is very good value - think it is about £50 per year - I'm on a legacy deal from years ago which provides lots of extra goodies that you would have to pay more for now.

But I don't use any - to be honest the only things I really care about are

1) Hosting my domain
2) eMail services

So my emails are like <anything>@<my-domain>

I don't have a huge number of email accounts, just family use and a few duplicates - probably around 10 in all. And they are only for personal use so not high capacity

Now the thing is, Dataflame is beginning to piss me off. The main problem is that their mail server IPs often build up a poor MTA reputation and occasionally get blacklisted - when this hits a certain threshold then my emails get rejected by some recipients.

Now I appreciate that this is down to the herberts that use the shared mail server IP but it happens far to frequently and Dataflame are poor at monitoring and fixing the problem themselves. Getting fed up of have to raise a ticket on a monthly basis, often have to explain to the so-called support person what the problem is and what they need to do to fix it.

A few questions then

1 - can anyone recommend any alternative email services - they can be more expensive but not excessively so

2 - how is the transfer of my domain done

3 - what sort of downtime can I expect between moving between hosting companies

BTW - if anyone is looking at Dataflame I would not recommend them.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
Personally I'd leave your domain with your registrar and just change the nameservers or DNS to your new provider.

Assuming you dont need a webmail client then most are much a muchness at the budget end of the market and all will risk blacklisting. I have been with a couple of better hosts over the years but they all have been bought out by larger players who notably reduced the quality of service and eventually I move on.

Also look at your domain registrar, I use 123-reg (not for hosting) but cannot check whilst on our clients wifi but as for example 1 and 1 charge £2/month for up to 20 mailboxes with 2 GB storage each and no webmail but you have to transfer the domain so they're the registrar.

A fair few people have good words for Google's GMail offering but to get multiple mailboxes from the same domain etc is a business service and their costs arent silly but more than a budget webhost.
 
Hi,

Thanks for the suggestions so far.

It is essential that I keep my eMail addresses - so I want to continue using my domain.

At present I pay Dataflame about £50 each year for hosting and about £10 every two years for the domain.

Although I have a comprehensive web hosting facility including databases and server-side code I only use the eMail Server facilities.

I appreciate what you are saying about most budget hosting companies being similar I am just growing really frustrated with Dataflame. It seems I have to do all the monitoring, and often have to tell them how to fix it - and they seem to be becoming slower and more obnoxious.

The latest incident has taken them nearly two days to resolve, with them telling me to be patient, that they are doing all they can and that I should buy a VPS service off them.

Don't really understand how domain registration works, other than I pay the bill every two years so don't really understand the options of transferring or leaving where it is.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
What are your actual requirements? Do you have a website? I have some very basic hosting with GoDaddy for my site, but I use gmail for emails to send and receive my @domainname mails.
 
What are your actual requirements? Do you have a website? I have some very basic hosting with GoDaddy for my site, but I use gmail for emails to send and receive my @domainname mails.

Email service using my registered domain.

Don't have a website, have the facilities to host a fully functional one and I have often said that I would have a play especially with server side data and code but never got round to it and doubt I ever would.

So if someone said "these guys are fantastic but only do email" then I would be interested.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
So if someone said "these guys are fantastic but only do email" then I would be interested.
Very few do email only, guess the demand is low, the ones that do often try and bundle it OWA/Outlook Online at a minimum and often with Microsoft Office 365 etc and so becomes expensive.

To have a server with potentially a thousand websites hosted on it with free MySQL databases etc costs peanuts per user. Given most use a tiny proportion of what allocation they get you can oversell space many times over. Hence you'll see email and web hosting bundled together as why buy/sell just email when the two together cost the same? Customers comparing will see all the extra they are getting for free.

As to your migration, in theory as long as you have an overlap of 2 days in theory there should be no losses but you need to have a way to get to your old/new mail servers other than mail.yourdomain.com

When you update your domain it takes up to 48 hours for it to replicate across the world. Most email will start arriving at your new host within an hour or two tops but there will be some that take over a day.
 

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