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Would you use email only plans?
CoastHosting
Member, Host Rep
in Help
Hello LET Community,
Thank you for all those who have supported us and are using our service we greatly appreciate all your support!
I am doing a bit of market research and thought i would start here as LET community are a very informative bunch 
in a good way!
We are thinking of launching email only plans as we have had a few requests. Is there a still a market for this what would you consider expected price point when compared to others.
Really appreciate your feedback!
Comments
your buddy is @jar doing email business.
I think this would be a good idea. We need some specials for the people that will lose Google Workspace.
Yes i have seen @jar offerings pretty great! Crossbox solution is an option
My rule of thumb is to never buy email hosting from a web hosting provider. MXRoute is the only email hosting I'd touch in the low-end (high-end) spectrum.
MXroute is prem service for 10€ a year, no fine print. Last provider that gave such prices went involucrated.
It's sort of interesting to me. Something with mail.baby or mailchannels for both deliverability and to stay off spam lists. It'd be great if there were also an option to be configured for levels of inbound filtering as that was the big undocumented issue I kept encountering (filters even before user level spamassassin). If you can't even direct stuff into a spam box it's pretty frustrating and sort of seems like a lot of providers don't care about their email services in hosting if they can't respond to support issues with their own filter setup.
One provider I trialed had all the mailchimp domains banned, promo.newegg rbl blocked as junk, and support didn't seem to understand why I might want my domain exempted from exim rbl filters on inbound because I wanted to get newegg promo emails or the newsletter for my local professional organization that comes via mailchimp that I signed up for.
When I did look for email-specific hosting, it seemed like the plans were often a bit too full-featured and were trying to charge $5/mo, which isn't exactly low-end for a personal email account that's just being used as a gmail-alternative. I do think you'd need to hit something like the under $15/yr target to be really attractive compared to low end alternatives with 1-5 gb storage allotments.
Another issue I encountered was cpanel's Track Delivery feature was great. The Direct Admin panel seems to keep that "feature" as a Pro-Pack thing and only give a crude log to the lifetime license that most shared hosts offer. As open as I am to the Direct Admin panel after hearing about cpanel pricing changes putting a squeeze on hosting, I really missed Track Delivery.
@Saahib might be interested
I am also using Mxroute. It is good to have alternative competitors. If you can provide an email marketing plan then it is very attractive. Currently, I use buttondown for newsletter.
Before jumping into the "how awesome is X provider", test it. Delivery is not the only one option which matters. Usually spam filtering outweights this when you start receiving thousands spam emails per day.
If that is your problem it will get insanely worse with such providers as mxroute. Spam filtering requires way more work than delivery.
Yeah, happens a lot after moving to hosted email. I'd like to test a provider which had a better filter for incoming spam
We would be focusing on very simple email no frills, mail channels for delivery, inbound filtering rules we would work through. Currently testing a few options. We did think about offering a suite style but as a company we are all about simplicity, we would rather focus on performance and add features only when absolutely needed. Don't fix whats not broken type of thing
Maybe offer lower prices with higher limits.
This is something I really wish DirectAdmin had. I'm on a legacy cPanel MXRoute plan and this is the one thing I'd miss if it were to be migrated to a DirectAdmin server.
We are looking at all options, we would still use cPanel. our price point would be around $45AUD a year for 10GB
After mxroute being regularly Thanos with their customer fiasco, I am kind of working on cheap yet reliable way to handle mail-only customer for future. I would love to integrate if someone offers service like SES with API but easier integration (no per domain setup).
For time being, kind of busy with other priorities.
Also, have personally dealt with mail server things in past for good long time, its engaging and only viable if you are doing it on large scale or for good margins.
Problem is most people compare them to Gmail. Google employs full teams working with AI and crazy stuff. It costs money. No one wants to spend the money (else they likely wouldn't be shopping around), not enough people want to contribute to open source projects. Spend less, get less. It's a good trade for a lot of people though, but not the ones greatly missing Gmail's filters and/or who finds themselves receiving above average spam (like I do, to my Gmail account, funny enough lol).
And if someone does develop their own filters that compete with Google, expect the prices to compare equally.
Take time to contribute to projects that aim to share and collaborate on improving things. I know I will, almost every day. https://github.com/mxroute/rspamd_rules
Appreciated.
I don't have a great deal of experience in the provider space for this, but speaking to colleagues, friends and family there seems to be a very high uptake of Microsoft 365 in the SMB space, some direct and some via godaddy. At least in the UK. They get Excel/Word etc "for free with their email" etc.
Again with my limited experience I would think it would be too costly to host a decent mail setup at a reasonable cost for the customers unless you can get at least tens of thousands of mailboxes.
I bought a Webspace hosting but use only the email hosting.
I realize that a lot of hosting Provider are not whitelisted at Microsoft Hotmail so my opinion any hosting Provider that not whitelisted by Microsoft is unprofessional. It's very hard to Approved by Microsoft Hotmail. I have an old Hotmail email where only a certain provider can't send emails to this account.
A lot of low price email hosting Provider are shit so Selfhost of e-mail Server is to unsave therefore go to a good email provider
Microsoft is just awful with their spam filtering
Yes, but I already have an MxRoute account. It is inexpensive, and email reliability is exceptional. It would be a challenge to beat their value proposition.
If you are planning to become an email-only provider, you will be very hard-pressed to compete with MxRoute on price or reliability. They have years of hard-won experience around maintaining reliable email servers, in an environment where any customer can cause serious trouble with the big name email services and email blacklists.
MxRoute has set a high bar for you. You may be able to compete if you can come close to their price/reliability, while offering features that they do not (yet) support.
Most of my email is with a shared hosting provider, for historical reasons. They offer cPanel, which makes it easy to manage. I have a static webpage. I don't care that they are focused on web hosting as long as my email is reliable. They are not as reliable as MxRoute, but good enough. I don't send bulk email - only ordinary person-to-person email, but reliability is essential.
I wanted to migrate all my email services from the shared hosting provider to MxRoute. By the time I got around to it, MxRoute had switched from cPanel to DirectAdmin. There are no user-level tools in DirectAdmin or MxRoute for backup or restoration of email accounts, forwarders, etc. You must write your own DirectAdmin scripts to do that, and I admit that I have been too lazy so far. (Honestly, I keep hoping that someone at MxRoute will do it and make it available for their customers. I think it would represent a huge growth opportunity if MxRoute made it easy for new customers to migrate from other hosts' cPanels, as well as providing a simple and easy to use backup/restore capability for existing customers.)
I have a secret for you. That whitelist doesn't exist. Hotmail has rejected emails from Gmail for IP reputation in their internal RBL. Microsoft often filters their own email to spam folders.
This is so unfortunately true.. my experience using a hotmail inbox is only as negative as it is because of the erratic nature of the spam filter.
I have too had Microsoft emails go to its own spam, I've also had emails of legitimate job interviews and even resulting job offers(!) go to spam because Microsoft decided that was necessary somehow. I'm not sure what powers that algorithm, but I do not have the same experience with Gmail or any other mail provider/software I've tried in my life.
Thankfully I don't get any actual spam to that account, because the filter has subconsiously taught me to check the spam folder as if it were a second inbox and to use my own best judgement when assessing if something is spam or not (Which is the only positive thing that came out of it honestly)
Google does it best because they can, providers taking from opensource software try their hardet and its usually enough. Microsoft somehow just completely fucked it up.
Appreciate everyone's feedback. Thank you!
You could try Mailcow as it's built specifically for email. Might not be as good as cPanel in some ways, but it's better in other ways, and it's open-source so you can modify it for your usecases, plus it has a decent API for your own integrations.
To succeed, you'd really need to have some value-add over other email providers, rather than just being another cookie-cutter cPanel host
Also "email only plans" is a weird phrase that essentially just means "email plans"
This would actually be a good draw.