How I chose an email hosting service to replace Gmail

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)

PriceSpace limitIMAP supportWebmail app# of addressesWeb Hosting Geeks.com ratingIncludes web hosting
BlueHost Plus$5.95/moUnlimitedYesYesUnlimited2.5Yes
InMotion Hosting$6.39/moUnlimitedYesYesUnlimited4.5Yes
Rackspace Email$2/user/mo (so for me, $6/mo)25GB/ accountYesYes1/$2 accountnot reviewedNo
Zoho$3/user/mo (so for me, $9/mo)30GB/ accountYesYes1/$3 accountnot reviewedNo

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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3 responses to “How I chose an email hosting service to replace Gmail”

  1. Not A Fake Name

    Like you I’m removing myself from the product category on the internet.

    I ended up choosing Protonmail for my private email address because my experience with mail service through Stablehost (and I assume it might be the same through other primarily webhosting companies) was that the amount of spam that got through was utterly unacceptable. I honestly liked Gmail more for the spam reduction than anything else.

    My Protonmail account is $4.00 usd per month but you’re right that the storage space is much lower. Who knows, perhaps in a year I’ll switch to a new provider but for now I’m just happy to be able to get rid of Gmail.

    I’d love to read updates on how you like your email hosting after some time.

    1. Well, Inmotion Hosting isn’t like Gmail or Protonmail, i.e., it’s not an email account provider, it’s a general Internet hosting provider, and that includes SMTP and other email services/support. (Here’s how I set it up.) So far, they’ve been great about providing much-needed support to make sure my mail isn’t considered spam by, e.g., Gmail. So far, so good. My only worry, to be honest, is that I don’t have 100% assurance that Inmotion Hosting doesn’t read my mail.

      1. Not A Fake Name

        Yeah, I did that with one of my earlier business emails since I have my site hosted by Stablehost anyway, and that’s what drove me to Google… The spam. Less so that my outgoing emails would be considered spam and more so that I got just a metric ton every day (to be fair, back then there was a lot more actual spam I think).

        It looks like the spam issue is better handled these days by hosting companies (or, more likely, you were better than I about assiduously setting it up). Perhaps in a year when my protonmail subscription ends I’ll switch over. My wife legitimately doesn’t use email at all, so the cost isn’t a major difference but it would be nice to have a backup hosting provider for my websites along with just a bit more control over my email/data.

        That’s a fair worry. My business is in healthcare so I have to have my business stuff hosted by a company that offers a HIPAA BAA, but I frankly don’t even trust that they are honoring that. Google was caught violating FERPA in order to build profiles of students and I have no illusions that any other major IT company is any better.

        I guess we all have to put some trust into companies we are loathe to trust.

        Good luck in your lockdown!

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