I want to lock down my cyber-life. One basic constraint is that I want to replace Gmail, and when I do so, I never want to change my email address again. My biggest concern is that I never again want to be beholden to any major Internet corporation that has shown its contempt for privacy and censorship concerns. But if I can get “the last email address I’ll ever need” while I’m at it, all the better.
The natural solution is to own my own domain name and seek out email hosting. This is not as difficult as it might sound, but it isn’t as easy as registering a new Google account. But then, that is exactly what Google is counting on: your laziness.
My new address will live at the newly-registered sanger.io domain. I and my family members can have unique and easy to remember email addresses for all the rest of our lives. After purchasing sanger.io (from NameCheap), I listed a number of features I knew I wanted: reasonable price, unlimited (or more than I could reasonably need) email storage space, IMAP support, a webmail app built in to the hosting provider (or else software that they make it easy for me to install on my new domain), and finally, enough email addresses for my purposes.
I ended up weeding out a fair few on grounds that they were too expensive (e.g., ProtonMail) or didn’t offer enough storage space or accounts (e.g., NameCheap). I also weeded many out because their Alexa rankings were above 10,000, and while that isn’t a total deal-breaker, I didn’t want my email host to quit on me, which would be a pain.
Private email hosting comparison (Jan. 2019)
| Price | Space limit | IMAP support | Webmail app | # of addresses | Web Hosting Geeks.com rating | Includes web hosting | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BlueHost Plus | $5.95/mo | Unlimited | Yes | Yes | Unlimited | 2.5 | Yes |
| InMotion Hosting | $6.39/mo | Unlimited | Yes | Yes | Unlimited | 4.5 | Yes |
| Rackspace Email | $2/user/mo (so for me, $6/mo) | 25GB/ account | Yes | Yes | 1/$2 account | not reviewed | No |
| Zoho | $3/user/mo (so for me, $9/mo) | 30GB/ account | Yes | Yes | 1/$3 account | not reviewed | No |
I also discovered that some competitive email hosting (in the case of BlueHost and InMotionHosting) comes packaged with shared web hosting, which would be handy. I mean, then I could finally ditch GoDaddy, which I’ve used since time immemorial. (I dislike their upselling and bait-and-switch tactics, and detest their clunky user interface.)
I use Zoho Mail for work, and it’s quite decent, but it costs half again as much and doesn’t bundle shared web hosting. RackSpace email hosting seems high-quality, but it fails by comparison with BlueHost and InMotionHosting, in that those two offer unlimited email addresses and unlimited email storage space. And between the latter two, InMotionHosting seems to be the better reviewed by WebHostingGeeks.com and in other reviews. Besides, it supports Ruby; I could host my Rails projects there.
I looked at a number of other reviews of InMotionHosting, and it does indeed look good. It also has spam protection (which I didn’t think to check on at first), lots of PostgreSQL databases if I want them, and free website data migration from GoDaddy.
I understand that this is not a route that most people will take. Paying for email seems unnecessary, many people would say. And certainly most people don’t need their own domain name for email, they think. But just imagine: you can have the same, perfectly appropriate email address for the rest of your life. And you no longer have to feel beholden to the privacy practices of an Internet giant like Google.
Look, you don’t have to be an uber-geek to do this. If you can’t do it yourself, and you can get a geeky friend to set this up for you—it’s not that expensive, and then you’d have your own address forever.
And you’d no longer have to support the growing monster that is Google. Gmail is admittedly a pretty awesome web app, but frankly I find I haven’t missed it much when using ZohoMail for work, and I don’t even use the Apple email client on my phone (I use Canary on my phone and Thunderbird for Ubuntu on desktop). So the slightly slicker quality of the Gmail web app really doesn’t make that much difference after all.
Next: how I set up my new private email hosting.
This was the second installment in my report about how I’m locking down my cyber-life.
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