Email Hosting for Home Users

Nowadays many people own domain names and use them both for websites and for email. Most home and small office users host their domain email services with their web host and share the space and bandwidth with their website. This is a fair choice but usually comes with many limitations related to the number of accounts you can have on a domain, allowed space and poor and inflexible administration utilities. Here we will list some of the other possible ways for hosting your own domain email.

Many email service providers include domain hosting. This is the perfect way to go if you own several domains and use other email addresses as well (such as Yahoo, GMail, etc) since they can consolidate all of these accounts into one. Among others, these are FastMail.FM and Runbox Mail Manager.

Some of the services that provide email hosting are:

• GMail for your domain
• Oli
• Mac OS X Hosting
• BlueTie
• Everyone.net
• Mail2Web offers Exchange hosting

Email Hosting DIY

If you are knowledgeable about computers and have an always on internet connection, you can host your email on your own machines at home. This is a risky solution if you don't know what you are doing, but is nice to try and the satisfaction is guaranteed if done properly. The main thing to take care about is to secure all possible points of failure which will guarantee you a peace of mind, knowing that no mails are ever lost.

The first thing to do is to install, configure and secure one of the email servers. If you don't have a static IP address, you will have to register with one of the dynamic DNS providers, DynDNS, No-IP and Dns2Go being the most popular choices. You should also ensure that your DNS is properly backed up. Next, you have to point your MX records to your email servers. This is configured in the control panel of your DNS provider. You also have to ensure that you have setup MX backup so that mail doesn't get lost when your server is down.