Best Email Hosting UK Providers (On-Going Case Study)

You may know Hostinger for their cheap web hosting services, but did you know they offer email hosting too?

Hostinger’s Business Email hosting plan starts from just £0.59 per month and offers a generous 10GB storage, 10 forwarding rules, 50 email aliases, anti-virus check, and multi-device support.

If you sign up for Hostinger’s email hosting on an annual basis, they’ll throw in a free domain which is incredibly awesome! You can access your emails from any device at any time, so this is an ideal solution for personal websites, blogs, and even small businesses.

Business Starter £0.59/month – 10GB mailbox
Business Premium £2.99/month – 50GB mailbox

If you’re looking for web hosting too, why not check out my Hostinger review.

Pros:

• Cheap email hosting plans
• Free domain name included
• 24/7 live support
• Social media integration
• HTML mail templates
• Cloudmark email protection
• Email importer
• Mailing lists
• Free email migration
• Anti-virus checker
• Multi-device support

Cons:

• Standard price is 55% more when not on offer

IONOS offer email hosting as part of their web hosting service. So you can get your own domain name as your email address. You can’t order the email service separately but for £1/month you get a full hosting package (and a free domain name).

You can also add on more users at your company domain name, so they are great for small or growing teams.

The bottom tier has 2GB of hosting, and you can add on extra email hosting space if required for an additional fee. They also offer useful features like an address book, calendar, and virus protection.

Pricing starts at just £1 per month and packages are as follows:

Mail Basic (£1 Per month) – 2 GB storage,  1 email address
Mail Business (£5+ per month) – 50G, additional team users can be added
Microsoft Exchange 2013 (£7 per month) – 25 GB storage

Pros:

• Use your own domain name
• 2GB of storage bundled with hosting
• Easy to set up

Cons:

• You need to host your website with IONOS to take advantage of their email hosting service
• Prices displayed rise after 12 months (hpwever this happens with all web hosts)

Pros

• 24/7 expert support
• Webmail email access
• Antivirus Protection
• POP3/IMAP4
• Active Sync tools

Cons

• Prices displayed exclude vat
• Can only use Outlook on the higher “exchange packages”
• No free email service
• Standard email package price rises after 12 months

Like their web hosting, SiteGround offers unmatched performance and reliability with their email hosting services. You’ll be able to create unlimited personalised email accounts as well as a host of third-party solutions to enable a smooth, spam-free, and fast email service.

SiteGround offers 3 pricing plans, each offering unique features powered by SiteGround’s awesome technology. All of their plans include free website hosting for at least 1 website, plenty of storage, and awesome features. You’ll get a free SSL, free website builder, free Cloudflare CDN, and 30-day money-back guarantee.

StartUp £1.99/month – 2GB mailbox
GrowBig £3.99/month – 4GB mailbox
GoGeek £5.99/month – 6GB mailbox

Pros:

• Unmatched speed and performance
• Free web hosting included
• Free SSL certificate on all plans
• Great 24/7 support
• 40 recipients per email on the lowest plan
• Email hosting for multiple domains
• Unlimited free email accounts with a domain name
• Horde, SquirrelMail and RoundCube included
• Email forwarding
• 30-day money-back guarantee
• Unmetered data transfer

Cons:

• Prices exclude VAT and require annual purchase in advance

BlueHost’s extremely affordable web hosting from £2.43 per month includes email hosting. Their hosting solution is one of the cheapest on the market, offering outstanding performance and speed. I highly recommend BlueHost to small websites and blogs as well as businesses just finding their feet.

You’ll get hosting for 1 website, 50GB SSD storage, unmetered bandwidth, a free SSL, and 5 email accounts. Each email account with BlueHost will offer 100MB storage space via their incredibly easy to use cPanel. As you move up their plans, you’ll notice there are no more storage limits, just limitations on the number of files you can store/send through your mail accounts.

Basic £2.43/month – 100MB mailbox
Plus £4.48/month – 200,000 file limit
Choice Plus £4.48/month – 200,000 file limit
Pro £11.47/month – 350,000 file limit

Pros:

• Unlimited email accounts on Plus (and +) plans
• Free web hosting included
• Free SSL certificate on all plans
• Unmetered bandwidth
• No limitations on storage on Plus (and +) plans
• Free Office 365 mailbox on Plus (and +) plans for 30 days
• Reliable and honest web solution
• Mail via cPanel
• Email forwarding
• Spam protection
• Unmetered data transfer
• £200 marketing credits

Cons:

• Storage on Basic plan is quite small

If you have a few domain names and want an email address for a campaign, then Zoho is a great option. They have a “Forever FREE Plan” that gives you email hosting for a single domain name. Looking for a bit more? Then Zoho offers bulk user plans. Even the paid options from Zoho are really cost-effective and feature-rich, which is impressive.

You can get started for free by either choosing their Forever Free plan or the 15-day free trial for Professional plan that doesn’t require credit card required. Zoho is a feature-rich email hosting platform that offers a lot of collaboration tools similar to Gmail. Such as Zoho meeting, Zoho connect, and Zoho docs.

Forever FREE – free
Mail Lite £0.79/user/month – 5GB
Mail Premium £3.17/user/month – 50GB
Workplace £2.38+ – 30GB-100GB storage space, price is agreed depending on whether you want email only or their other collaboration tools.

Pros:

• Forever Free plan
• 15-day free trial
• Professional email addresses at your domain
• Easy to use UX
• 25 MB email attachments
• Email hosting for multiple domains
• IMAP/ POP access in email clients
• Exchange Active sync
• Email forwarding
• Additional storage upgrade options available
• Tasks, Notes and Bookmarks
• Free mobile apps for iOS and Android

Cons:

• Paid email hosting is billed annually

G Suite from Google allows you to use the same interface as the free Gmail uses. Meaning you don’t need to learn how to use a new piece of software. Also, you get access to all of the google applications like docs and sheets that allow you to collaborate remotely. Great for teams that are in multiple locations as meetings can be done in hangouts on your professional domain. One of the best things about Gsuite is the fact that you get unlimited storage.

With G Suite you get access to all of their collaboration tools in one place. The best thing about G suite is the fact that it is all cloud-based, so you can collaborate with anyone in the world.

Basic – £4.71/month
Business – £9.43/month – Unlimited storage space

Pros

• Decent spam filters
• Unlimited storage
• Use your own domain name for your email address
• Great collaboration tools
• Easy to use interface
• Additional storage
• Archive tool for email and chat
• 14-day free trial

Cons

• Expensive
• They are quick to lock you out if you don’t pay

Mail.com is a subsidiary of 1&1 IONOS offering personalized email hosting. Mail.com offers many of the services that you get from Gmail. However they don’t allow you to use your own domain name, on the other hand, you can use one of their domain names, however, you are restricted to names available on their dropdown list.

You can get started for free and select a personalized email address. You can choose from over 200 unique domains, for example, yourname@scotlandmail.com or yourname@madonnafan.com. Domain names can be chosen by geographic location or career

Pros:

• Free email hosting
• Apps available for smartphones and most devices
• Choose from 200 domains
• Free & customized email apps
• Large Attachments up to 50 MB
• Up to 10 Alias Addresses
• Virus Protection
• Personalization features
• Free email hosting service
• Can be incorporated into other online business activities

Cons:

• Can’t use with your own domain name

One.com is first and foremost a website host that offers some cost-effective hosting and decent website builders. However, they also offer feature-rich email hosting for professional email addresses.

The smallest email hosting package from One.com offers a sizable 50GB of storage. In fact, the features offered by One.com for email should have everything required for professional email communication. There is no free email hosting package, however, they do offer great packages as follows:

Starter email – £0.99/ month – 50GB Storage
Professional plus email – £2.76/ month – 200GB Storage
Business email – £9.50/ month – 500GB Storage

Pros

• 24/7 Support
• Spam & virus protection
• Professional email (on your own domain)
• Calendar
• Address book
• Backup & restore feature
• Unlimited bandwidth, email accounts, aliases.
• Can be used with email clients like webmail or outlook
• 15-day money-back guarantee
• £11 setup fee

Cons

• Prices displayed are promotional

Rackspace is a security-conscious email hosting provider that focuses solely on business email. They offer a brilliant 100% uptime guarantee, which is great for modern businesses. Their prices start from £2.41 per user/ month. A free trial is available, which is great if you just want to give it a go.

Possibly because Rackspace focuses solely on email provision, they have a great range of features that are tailored for the small business owner. They offer a lot of tools to make their email solution more complete – for example, they offer live chat for your email and other collaboration tools.

Pros

• Business domain name
• Secure IMAP (for Outlook & smartphone users)
• Spam & virus protection
• Auto-setup tool, for easy email set up
• 25 GB mailboxes
• Email forwarding
• Recover deleted email
• 50 MB attachments
• Additional Benefits
• 100% Uptime Guarantee

Cons

• No free email packages
• Starter package quite expensive, however it does offer a decent amount of storage space

Microsoft Office 365 comes with an email package that supersedes many of the individual paid email hosting options out there. Mainly on space, as you get 1TB of storage with the OneDrive account. You can also get access to Microsoft Exchange servers via many hosting providers.

Also, Outlook is a nice UX to work with that can be deployed directly onto your device. With Microsoft Office 365 you get access to all of the Microsoft Office apps like Word, Powerpoint, Outlook, and Excel in one package.

Microsoft Office 365 is great for expanding businesses that need the full suite of business and productivity apps. The Business Premium package gives you live online conferencing and chat capabilities.

Office 365 business – £7.90/ month – 1TB storage
Office 365 Business Premium – £9.40user/month – 1 TB storage

Pros

• Massive amounts of space
• Complete suite of apps for business users
• Get access to web versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
• License covers 5 devices per user
• 1 TB of OneDrive storage space
• Maximum of 300 users
• 24/7 phone & web support

Cons

• Quite expensive if you don’t want to use their other Office features
• Best for Premium business email hosting

Liquid Web is first and foremost a website host and secondly, it is an email host that grows with your company and is great for removing spam. I particularly like the fact that they stop spam before it even gets to your inbox.

Liquid Web is a flexible feature-rich email hosting provider. However, they don’t have a free trial or the ability to use their service without hosting with them.

Premium Business Email (£0.79/user/month) – 25GB
Hosted Exchange (£7.92/user/month) – 100GB

Pros

• 24/7 support
• Bulk pricing can be agreed
• Sync with your mailbox
• Email archiving available for an additional fee (£2.38)
• Customizable settings for filters, alerts, language, blacklists etc..
• 100% uptime guarantee
• Calendar & Address book
• Import/ export from Outlook or Gmail
• Task management and notes feature

Cons

• £7.92/month base charge applied
• Your need to host with Liquid Web to be able to take advantage of their email service