Email on Your Domain

Three Categories, No Brand Lock-in

Registrar-bundled email comes with your domain registration. Many registrars offer basic mailboxes as part of a domain package or as an inexpensive add-on. The advantage is simplicity: one account, one dashboard, one bill. The limitation is that bundled email services typically offer less storage, fewer features, and less sophisticated spam filtering than dedicated providers. If you later transfer your domain to a different registrar, migrating the email may not be straightforward. Independent email hosting providers sell email as their core product. You keep your domain at whatever registrar you prefer and point your MX records to the email provider's servers (see the DNS records guide for how MX records work). This separation means you can switch registrars or web hosting providers without touching your email. A consultancy firm with five team members, for example, can set up professional inboxes through an independent provider and keep them running regardless of what happens to the firm's website hosting. Self-hosted email means running your own mail server. This gives you complete control over storage, privacy, and configuration. It also means you are responsible for deliverability, security patches, spam filtering, and uptime around the clock. For most small businesses and individuals, the maintenance burden outweighs the control benefits. Self-hosting is a realistic option only if you have the technical skill and the willingness to monitor a mail server continuously.

The Hidden Long-Term Costs

The per-mailbox cost of email hosting scales with every person who needs an address. A solo site owner pays little. A ten-person team pays ten times that. Over three years, the cumulative difference between a lower-cost independent provider and a premium one can be substantial, especially when multiplied across users. Some categories that appear free or very cheap at the outset impose storage limits that force upgrades as your mail archive grows. Others charge separately for features like aliases, forwarding rules, or calendar integration that you may assume are included in the base plan. Use the cost calculator on this page to enter your number of mailboxes, expected storage needs, and contract period. It shows the three-year total for each category so you can compare them on equal terms rather than introductory pricing alone.

Changing email providers is more disruptive than changing web hosts. Choose with the assumption that migrating later will cost time and carry risk of missed messages during the transition.