Why should you host your website and email with different email providers?
Many web hosting packages include email, so it’s natural to ask yourself:
Why incur the additional expense of having email with a different provider than your website?
Why isn’t email included in specialized WordPress hosting like Wetopi’s?
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Benefits of Hosting Your Website and Email on Separate Servers
- Our Recommended Email Providers
- What About Bulk or Transactional Email Services?
- Conclusion
Introduction
There are several reasons why choosing a good email provider is one of those really important tasks. To name a few:
If you want the best hosting for your WordPress site, why not want the same for your email?
For most people and businesses, email is NOT an optional extra. Email is something we rely on daily to communicate and an indispensable channel for keeping a business running.
We all need a reliable email service. And reliability is something we often take for granted—until something goes wrong.
Good service providers tend to specialize in one thing and do it really well. For example, at Wetopi, we offer fully managed and specialized WordPress hosting. That’s all we do, and we’re really good at it!
We are not experts in providing email accounts or domain registration services, so we don’t offer them. Many hosting companies bundle all these services, but honestly, if you want the best possible service, would you go to a generalist or a specialist?
Shared hosting with included email is fine for casual users and small personal websites, but if your website and email are critical to your business, opting for specialists in “best-in-class” services for each task will offer you the best performance, flexibility, and security.
At Wetopi, an exclusively WordPress hosting provider, we believe in service specialization as a means to enhance WordPress security. Below, we detail the benefits.
Benefits of Hosting Your Website and Email on Separate Servers
Aside from best practices, there are other benefits to hosting your website and email on separate servers managed by different providers.
1. Forget About Spam
A major advantage of using a specialized email service is that they take spam seriously. Yes, the email included in your hosting package may have some built-in spam filtering, but it’s likely not as good, letting spam through or, worse, flagging genuine emails as spam. Remember, anti-spam systems use self-learning rules that improve by processing large volumes of email collectively.
Specialized email providers have much more refined spam filtering systems. It’s their job to ensure their clients have a superior email experience, which translates to heavy investment in developing precise anti-spam filters and keeping them constantly updated.
2. Avoid Blacklist Issues
In shared web hosting, you always run the risk of sharing an IP address with someone using shady business practices. Just as you wouldn’t want your website hosted in a “bad neighborhood,” you wouldn’t want your email to share an IP address with a spammer.
If an email account on your server is hacked and used to send spam, your IP could also end up on a blacklist. Worst case scenario, if your web server and email share the same IP, firewalls could also block access to your website.
In shared hosting, a spammer on the same server could unknowingly harm the online reputation of your entire business by causing the IP address to be blacklisted.
3. Improved Reliability and Portability
The problem with putting all your eggs in one basket is that if you drop the basket, all the eggs break. In hosting terms, if one service goes down, everything goes down.
Even with reliable hosting providers, no one can guarantee 100% uptime. While a few minutes of website downtime may not be catastrophic, losing or delaying important emails could be critical.
Additionally, if you ever need to move your web server and are forced to move your email as well, you face the hassle of reconfiguring accounts on all your devices and the risk of losing emails during the transition. MX records can take hours to propagate, which is too long to go without email if it’s critical to your business operations.
By hosting your email with a separate provider, you won’t have to worry about email disruptions when updating or changing your web server.
4. No Resource Overload on Your Server
If you run your website and email on the same server, you risk overloading server resources. This is especially true if you send bulk emails, which is not recommended on shared hosting, as it can lead to service suspension for exceeding resource limits.
Our Recommended Email Providers
There are many specialized email services, but here are a few we recommend for our WordPress hosting clients looking for a reliable email provider:
Google Workspace
Google Workspace is our top choice for email hosting, and we use it ourselves. If you’re one of the 1.2 billion Gmail users, you already know that Google excels at email.
Google Workspace offers advanced spam protection, strong security features, and a suite of productivity tools such as Calendar, Drive, Docs, and Sheets. These services are available as enhanced versions in paid plans, which also include excellent mobile apps.
Microsoft 365
If you rely on Microsoft software like Word or Excel for work, or you don’t feel comfortable sharing data with Google, Microsoft 365 is an excellent alternative for email hosting.
Microsoft 365 offers comparable plans to Google Workspace with robust spam protection and excellent desktop applications for premium subscribers. If you prefer working outside of a browser, Microsoft 365 may be the better option for you.
Zoho Mail
For a budget-friendly yet high-quality email service, Zoho Mail is our top recommendation. It offers premium service at a great value.
Like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, Zoho includes its own suite of tools. However, if you’re accustomed to Microsoft or Google tools, you may want to stick with what you know.
DonDominio
If you’re not ready to switch to a premium email service, there’s an affordable alternative:
DonDominio offers basic email hosting with their Mini plan for just €1 per year.
What About Bulk or Transactional Email Services?
Of course, these recommendations are only suitable for general business email. If you need to send an email campaign to thousands of people at once, you’ll need a service designed for bulk email.
If you want to send automated emails when a user takes action on your website—such as signing up or making a purchase—you’ll need a transactional email service. This is essential for websites that generate hundreds of emails daily.
Deliverability can be a significant issue for bulk and transactional emails. On average, 15% of all commercial email never reaches the inbox.
We recommend using a service like Mailgun, Sendgrid, or Mandrill for sending bulk and transactional emails. These services are experts in managing email IP addresses, monitoring abuse and bounce rates, and ensuring the highest email deliverability rates in the industry.
Conclusion
Choosing a different provider for your website and email may seem inconvenient and like an additional expense at first. However, it can save you a lot of headaches and is almost essential if sending and receiving email is critical to your business operations.
And with options starting at just €1 per year, there’s really no excuse not to enjoy the increased reliability and flexibility that separating email from web hosting provides.
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