If you run an online business, you are probably painfully aware of how important it is to have a reliable email host. Without emails, business communication is unthinkable today.
It is hard to calculate how many messages are whizzing between servers around the world every second, resolving a wide variety of issues from answering customer queries to clarifying marketing strategies.
Let’s look at the main pillars of an email hosting’s price.
Web Hosting vs. Email Hosting
Even if you already have some web hosting plan, email hosting may or may not be part of its total monthly price.
In a nutshell, web hosts store your website on one or more servers, while email hosts store your emails and email attachments. More often than not, web hosting plans include email hosting.
Because email correspondence is your business’s lifeline, you may wish to separate the two hosting solutions.
You can, for example, get web hosting from Bluehost but use A2 Hosting to host your email messages. In this way, your email correspondence will not compete with your website over server resources.
The Average Price of Email Hosting
A few key variables form the retail price of a web hosting plan. One of the cheapest options is to store your company’s email correspondence in the cloud. Cloudways provides email hosting to its clients for just $2 per month.
However, the cheapest email hosting option is also the most vulnerable to security breaches and sensitive information leaks.
Another option is to load business emails onto an unmanaged private server. You can rent one for as little as $2.50 per month. The downside is that you have to take care of all technical issues on your own.
If you want to rest assured that your business emails will arrive on time every time, you should use managed email hosting for between $10 and $20 per month.
Affordable Email Hosting Providers
Here are the three most affordable email hosting providers we could find. The bundles of the first two candidates may not be as comprehensive as those of the mighty Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, but they surely deliver the best bang for your buck!
Zoho Mail
Zoho Mail is the only email hosting provider to offer a free plan. It includes up to five user inboxes with a storage capacity of 5 GB each. Each user can email attachments of up to 25 MB.
The catch is that the free plan only works with Zoho’s webmail client and does not allow third-party integrations.
Zoho Mail’s paid plans start from $1/user/month and include a bunch of useful features such as domain aliases, email recalls, and IMAP/POP access. The attachments’ size grows to 250 MB.
Namecheap
Namecheap got on our radar by offering a 60-day free trial with every plan. The cheapest one starts from just over $0.84 per user per month.
Each new inbox costs $0.41, and the storage capacity is also decent: 5 GB for emails and 2 GB for attachments.
Namecheap’s Pro Plan costs $2.40 per month and comes with three inboxes. Every new inbox that you wish to add will cost you $1.24. The storage capacity is significantly bigger: 30 GB for emails and 15 GB for files.
Namecheap’s priciest plan is called Ultimate. You get five mailboxes for just under $4 per month, and every new mailbox costs $2.07. Each mailbox can store up to 75 GB of messages and 30 GB of files.
Google Workspace
The more sophisticated version of Gmail clung to the third spot on our list not so much for its affordability as for the wide variety of useful apps in the G-suite like Google Docs and Sheets.
Google’s Business Starter Plan costs $6 per month and includes only one customized business inbox and 30 GB cloud storage capacity. The plan also allows video conferencing with up to 100 participants and standard email support via email.