5 Best Cheap Email Hosting Providers
Email is and has been the number one way to communicate and distribute information over the Internet for many years now. Businesses have identified emails as an excellent marketing tool for a long time now. This is why it is crucial for all potential and starting businesses and websites to learn how to take advantage out of all the power that emails provide when it comes to growing your website or business and market your products to your audience.
With over a billion users around the entire world, email has overtaken phone and cemented its position as the number one communication tool to spread information. And email will remain in this position for many years to come. The effectiveness and popularity of emails have resulted in an increasing demand for email hosting for all kinds of websites, businesses and entrepreneurs.
One of the main reasons why email has become such a vital service for websites and businesses is its use in customer service. Email can also prove to be very important in other communication aspects, such as marketing and other objectives. The requirements from email hosting providers has increased, with technological advances, better infrastructure, uncompromised quality and non-stop uptime have become crucial to any email hosting service.
In this article, we will try and help you decide the best email hosting provider for your needs. We will be looking at cheap shared email hosting plans in particular because they are by far the best option for your budget. We will look at some key areas and features that you need to be informed about when judging and choosing the right email hosting provider for your website and we will also look at some carefully handpicked shared email hosting plans that we have reviewed just for you.
How to Choose a Good Email Hosting Provider
There are many different hosting plans available when it comes to email hosting. They all provide basic capabilities as well as some advanced features and options. There are too many to choose from, so let’s start off by identifying the main features and areas that you need to carefully take into account when choosing the right email hosting provider for your website’s or business needs.
If your email hosting budget is thin or if you’re simply now starting on your way towards building a successful website or business, cheap shared email hosting plans are definitely the way to go. These shared plans are able to provide decent service at great quality by sharing the resources of a server to many different customers. They are the most cost effective option, however, if your website or business grows large enough and these shred plans cannot provide your enlarged email needs, you might have to look and upgrade your email hosting plan to a more advanced and more expensive package.
The number one feature that you would want to expect from your email hosting provider is to have a customizable email address option that can be changed to your own domain. Having your own domain in your email address increases the legitimacy and professional look of your website or business. Another important feature that you need to expect from your email hosting provider is to provide web based email capabilities. This helps you be able to check your email wherever you are in the world.
Email Forwarding
Email forwarding is a very important and a very useful feature that you should be able to take advantage of. During your tenure as a website or business owner, you will most probably create more than one email address for your needs. Email forwarding is a very important tool that lets you automatically redirect emails from one address to another.
Autoresponder
A slightly different, but equally vital tool that you should expect from your email hosting provider is an Autoresponder. These responder tools allow you to automatically respond to emails sent to you with a pre-defined response. This is particularly useful if your website or system has a registration process and you will most certainly require an autoresponder tool to be able to verify email addresses of your registrants.
Spam Filter
Spam will be a big problem whenever you’re using email addresses. It is highly recommended to take anti-spam measures and tools into consideration very carefully when you’re choosing your email hosting provider. Anti-spam tools are a must, but customizable spam filters are also a great way to reduce the amount of spam delivered to your email address.
A lot of different adware, malware and viruses get sent through email. The most widespread viruses and trojans have been spread across the world with the help of email. This is why it is of very high importance for your email hosting provider to have virus checking and virus removal tools and features. Look for email hosting providers that have automatic virus scans.
Now that you are familiar with the most important aspects that you have to take into consideration when you’re choosing an email hosting provider, it’s time to look at some of the best email hosting providers that we have specifically handpicked for you due to their reliability, affordability and quality.
iPage
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Starting at just $1.99 per month, iPage manages to provide one of the cheapest shared email hosting services without cutting down on its features and options that it provides. Some of the core features that iPage has to offer to each and every customer is an unlimited disk space, which is very important for email hosting, as well as unlimited bandwidth and no limit on the amount of different domain names that can be used. There also are unlimited MySQL databases available.
You will be able to easily monitor your website and email activities with the help of important tools like file managers, FTP data transfer managers, automatic backup software as well as usage monitors that help you track your bandwidth as well as disk usage. iPage has one of the best established hosting infrastructures and that allows them to guarantee uninterrupted uptime, great speed and reliability.
When it comes to features most relevant to sending and receiving mail, iPage provides you with a customizable email address that you can set up to use with your very own website or business domain. You can additionally use the WebMail software that will give you great web based email capability to check your emails no matter where you’re located in the world.
iPage also has to offer autoresponder tools as well as email forwarding options. You will be fully able to easily and quickly set up email forwarding that can automatically forward email sent from one email address to another email address that you own. The autoresponder will help you automatically respond to certain types of email with a pre-designed response.
The final aspect that makes this particular email hosting provider an excellent choice to consider when choosing an email hosting provider for your needs, is customer support. iPage provides 24/7 professional customer support that can be accessed through phone or chat. There is also a detailed help center as well as a ticketing system. For beginners, there are very useful video tutorials available that can inform and teach you about many features and tools that this particular email hosting service provides.
FatCow
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FatCow is another great email hosting provider that offers some important key email hosting features as well as some unique features and capabilities that other providers won’t be able to match. You will be able to create as many POP and IMAP mailboxes as you want or need which practically allows you to have unlimited email addresses. You will also have a free domain available to you for the first year of the hosting package.
This great email hosting provider also allows you to have unlimited disk space which can be very useful when using lots of different email addresses. You will also have access to tools that allow you to manage and monitor your files and emails quickly and easily.
There are absolutely no limits on bandwidth with the FatCow email hosting provider and their powerful and modern infrastructure is built to support even high amounts of traffic on its servers. The shared hosting plans that we are most interested in this article use a shared architecture in order to provide the most amount of hosting to its customers while also keeping the prices affordable.
This means, however, that if your business or website grow large enough and your email needs outgrow the capabilities of the shared hosting plans, you would have to look at some more advanced hosting packages like virtual private server hosting or dedicated server hosting.
Additionally, FatCow provides to all of their customers a WebMail client in order to access you email as well as an advanced and powerful spam filtering tool and a newsletter managing tool that allows you to set up a newsletter on your website that can be helpful when building your audience and building your very own email lists.
In addition to 24/7 professional customer support that is available for every customer to use, there is a comprehensive FAQ library as well as many informative step by step tutorials that can teach you about setting up your website, email or whatever else you might need help with that is relevant to web and email hosting.
JustHost
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Although JustHost is a bit pricey when compared to other shared email hosting providers with its $3.95 per month price tag, it balances with the competition by offering tons of great features and some unique capabilities that the competition cannot match.
With the shared hosting plan of JustHost, you will have unlimited domain hosting and unlimited disk space. You will also have the ability to set up international domain names as well as have full access to three different WebMail clients that allow you to access your email accounts wherever you are in the world.
Your email accounts will be secured by POP3 security as well as Secure IMAP. You will be able to set up forwarding on any of your email accounts and even set up add-on and parked domains as well as subdomains for your email addresses. All of these features can be easily and quickly accessed through the powerful cPanel account control panel.
In order to protect you from annoying and potentially harmful spam massages, you will have access to the Spam Assassin software. The infrastructures on which the JustHost hosting services are built on are truly world class. Nonstop uptime is guaranteed and you can also have full nonstop network monitoring for your websites and email addresses. If you need it, you can also do automatic backups.
BlueHost
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BlueHost is one of the largest and most trusted hosting providers on the market. The shared hosting packages that this particular hosting provider has to offer are quite cheap and offer many great and powerful features and tools that can help you with your website and email management.
Even with the most basic shared hosting packages, you will have access to unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email accounts available to be created as well as access to up to 5 parked domains and up to 25 sub domains that you can use. Your email addresses will remain safe and secure with the help of Secure POP3 and Secure IMAP capabilities.
Some of the advanced features available in all shared hosting packages provided by BlueHost are the email forwarding support that gives you complete control over how you define the rules of email forwarding. Additionally, you can also set up account filters as well as automatic responders for your email addresses.
You will also have access to spam protection and controls and access for unique user accounts. For further safety and reliability, this particular hosting provider makes automatic daily backups so you will have the ability at any time to restore a previous backup in case you end up screwing something up.
The biggest advantage of the shared hosting plans of BlueHost is the great resource protection feature. This amazing feature recognizes hosting customers that use excessive bandwidth or other server resources, and instead of cutting their hosting, it re-assigns them to special isolated servers in order not to decrease the performance and quality of service for other users sharing the server.
The BlueHost customer support is very professional, helpful and available 24/7 through phone, chat, email or tickets. Additional useful features include technological scalability that fits your website and email needs as they evolve and grow an enhanced professional cPanel tool that features additional tools and options to help you manage your email, website, domains and more.
InMotion Hosting
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In addition to offering free SSD driver and a free domain to all of their customers, the InMotion shared hosting plan also offers free data backups and a Secure IMAP email access that allows you to access and sync up your email across different devices wherever you are. There is also full integration of Google applications as well as fully free data backups available for every customer.
With InMotion, you will have an unlimited number of available email accounts as well as unlimited disk space, email storage and monthly transfers. This allows this great hosting provider to fit the needs of any customer that requires extensive email hosting.
You will have access to 6 parked domains as well as 25 available sub domains that you can use with the shared hosting package that InMotion provides. Your email addresses will be fully secured with the SPAM Safe email software. InMotion also sets up email addresses with the IMAP platform allowing you to access and sync up your email addresses through different platforms and devices.
The professional customer support team is available to you 24/7 through phone or chat. There also is a 90 day money back guarantee in case InMotion doesn’t provide what it promises. Finally, there is extensive and professional malware protection available for all of your email addresses.
Conclusion
Choosing the right shared email hosting package that is right for you can be a very long and complicated task. This is mainly due to the sheer number of hosting providers that are competing in a fairly saturated field. They will all offer different and varied packages with different tools, options and prices.
We hope that we have successfully managed to inform you on the most important aspects that you need to take into careful consideration when choosing the shared email hosting provider that will be able to fulfill your email hosting needs.
We have also carefully looked through many different email hosting providers in order to find the absolute best ones for you. These hosting providers have been judged on their efficiency, reliability, price and the features that they have to offer. All of them will be quite cheap and a great budget option due to the shared hosting capabilities. Some will be more expensive, but they will have to offer some advanced tools and features for you to use.
We hope that this article was helpful and we guarantee that whichever shared email hosting provider you end up choosing from this list, you won’t regret your decision.
David Cross
David is the chief editor at WebHostingMedia right from the beginning. He has a great passion for building and managing websites and creating helpful content. He is also interested in programming - currently learning python.
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This article is very misleading. Many of these companies do not provide email hosting only, and this article would lead one to believe that they do. In other words, if you are looking for email only and your website is elsewhere, you are out of luck with these vendors.