email management options analysis for cpanel, shared and reseller hosting

There are a few ways to manage your email, they have different costs, pros and cons.

The major options are:

• hosted by gmail with a paid account
• hosted by cpanel
• hosted by cpanel, but read by gmail
• redirected by cpanel

There are also some related DNS and uptime issues. If you set things up correctly  the hosting being down doesn’t effect email being down in the first scenario.

1.Hosted by gmail with a paid account

This is by far the best option, but it costs USD$5/month/account. The price of this option often exceeds the cost of shared hosting, but it’s the most reliable, and best supported.

You can read the email on your phone, in a web browser – there are a lot of options that all works very well. Your outgoing mail works well with the correct domain name.

In this scenario the MX records are set to gmail – so the email goes straight to gmail, and not to your hosting provider first.

If you setup the DNS to be external to your hosting provider, with something like cloudflare, if/when the hosting goes down your email will still work. So you can still communicate with your customers.

https://apps.google.com.au/intx/en_au/pricing.htm

2.Hosted by cpanel

This stores the email with the hosting account.

There are no costs with this option.

You can read the email on your phone, or in a web browser.

There is minimal support for email, from your hosting provider, none of which actually want to help with email.

If your hosting goes down, your email goes down as well. If your hosting isn’t down for too long incoming email will get queued and it will catch up when the hosting is repaired.

3.Hosted by cpanel , read by Gmail

there is no cost to this option also

email is first delivered to your hosting provider, and gmail comes along every so often and copies your email into gmail. Then you read it from gmail.

You are still reliant on your hosting working. And the support for email is split between your hosting and gmail.

It’s a bit complicated to configure, but if you do it correctly, then it works pretty well and you can control the outbound email from.

here is a guide to set this up https://my.hostmonster.com/cgi/help/gmail

4.Redirected by cpanel

this option has no costs either

Instead of gmail reading the email every so often, cpanel resends the email to gmail.

You are still reliant on your hosting working. And the support for email is split between your hosting and gmail.

It is very similar to option 3 above, but the emails get to gmail a bit faster, and a bit more reliable. The email doesn’t get permanently stored on hosting server.

By Scott Farrell on April 23rd, 2016 , Follow @scott_WordPress Tweet to @scott_WordPress