I've come to find out that email-only hosting services are (necessarily) expensive when you're in that weird middle ground of being a small business (technically two businesses with two domains each) but you have 50+ email addresses for technical reasons. We have 20 employees across the two businesses but most employees need at least two email addresses, and we have some generic addresses (think orders@domain, support@domain etc.) required for accounts with various services that aren't necessarily tied to one employee.

So, our normal webhost (InMotionHosting, I DO NOT RECOMMEND THEM) has all of our email hosted across the four domains, but they are currently not hosting any of our websites because 1) they suck and 2) we have two eCommerce sites, each with a backup domain, that are hosted at their respective software vendor (X-Cart and Shopify (I know, I know, wasn't my decision and my protests were overridden by management)). We made the decision this year to move both eCommerce sites off of IMH and onto those native platforms due to the utterly horrid service we were getting with IMH.

ANYWAY, back to the cost discussion: It's currently costing us around $4k for a three year contract with IMH, where again, we are only hosting email at this time. We are paying for a managed VPS with all the trimmings at that rate. Since we don't need them for hosting anymore, I'm exploring options for email-only hosting that might cost less and be easier to manage with more features.

Well, "easier to manage with more features" is certainly available; my beloved Fastmail has business hosting plans that cover all of our needs and has plenty of added features should we ever want to explore them.

But damn, they are (understandably) pricey; $5/user/month adds up to nearly $10k over three years, and even if we take the three-year discount pricing into consideration, it's still nearly double the cost of just staying where we are, not to mention the human-hours I'll spend moving everyone's accounts over, some going back to nearly 30 years of emails we need to preserve for legal and tax reasons. I've already done that move twice since I started working here 16 years ago, and I loathe the idea of doing it again even if it's for the last time.

I'm not seeking recommendations, though I do welcome any offered. Just venting about the sad state of email hosting these days. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.