Email has been a crucial form of electronic communication for decades, and it will likely be ubiquitous for many more years to come. While there are plenty of free email services available for Australian users and small businesses, many of them lack specialised features, such as central management that lend themselves well for office use.
We evaluated the best systems on the market and compared them based on price, features, security and more to help you make the best decision for your team.
The Forbes Advisor Small Business team is committed to bringing you unbiased rankings and information with full editorial independence. We use product data, strategic methodologies and expert insights to inform all of our content and guide you in making the best decisions for your business journey.
We reviewed providers using a complex scoring methodology to help you find the five best email hosting services for small businesses. Our ratings consider factors such as price per user, number of features available and a review by our experts based on the opinions of real users. Our Australian-based editorial also applied an additional layer of research to determine the best option for local users. All ratings are determined solely by our editorial team.
Note: The below list represents a selection of our top category picks, as chosen by Forbes Advisor Australia’s editors and journalists. The information provided is purely factual and is not intended to imply any recommendation, opinion, or advice about a financial product. Not every product or provider in the marketplace has been reviewed, and the list below is not intended to be exhaustive nor replace your own research or independent financial advice. For more information on how Forbes Advisor ranks and reviews products, including how we identified our top category picks, read the methodology selection below.
Email hosting refers to the technology that stores your email messages, files and other information on a remote server. Email hosting services also make it easy to set up and deploy individual email accounts for your employees. Whether it’s your personal email address, such as a Gmail account, or a work account, all email activity is hosted in some way, shape or form.
Finding the right email hosting solution for your business is a function of your needs. You have to consider factors like your industry, existing IT environment, headcount, inbox and attachment-size requirements, feature requirements and more. If you need to support a lot of users, you probably want something with volume discounting. If you are in an industry that is disproportionately targeted by cybercriminals, then you should consider security-focused providers.
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1
Bluehost
Starting price
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2
HostGator
Starting price
$US3.75 ($5.62 AUD) per month
Storage and Bandwidth
Unmetered
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Free domain registration for a year, free website and domain transfer, free SSL certificate, free email
3
IONOS
Starting price
$US2 ($2.95 AUD) per month
Drag-and-drop interface
Yes
SSL certificate included
Yes
To choose the email hosting providers for this ranking, Forbes Advisor compared each company based on important factors that include features and pricing. We ranked each company on these factors based on a five-star rating system, with the highest score being five out of five stars. Our criteria were similar to that we applied to our guide to the best web hosting services but with some changes to account for email-specific needs.
Email hosting pricing models and total costs were evaluated based on per-user pricing and volume discounting. Those providers whose pricing was considered to be cheap or midrange fared the best. Pricing accounted for 30% of our weighted scoring.
We compared email hosting providers based on their functions and features, giving preference to providers with the most useful features and tools. Among these included whether a provider offered security tools and calendar functionality, made a mobile app available, offered inbox sizes of at least 20 GB and allowed for attachment sizes of at least 10 MB. We weighted features at 40% of our total score.
Vendors should make it easy for customers to get in touch with support staff in case they need help. That was one of the many factors that real users mentioned in third-party reviews, and our experts scoured these reviews to gauge opinions of these email hosting services. Additionally, we researched reviews to get users’ opinions related to ease of use, stand-out features, popularity and value for the money. Our experts’ analysis made up 30% of the total score.
You don’t have to pay someone to host your email for you. You can host email on your own servers. However, that means you have to purchase, configure and maintain an email server and register your domain on your own. Using an email hosting provider will save companies a lot of time, money and frustration.
Similar to web hosting sites, email hosting services use several layers of security to protect the integrity of your email communications. These include end-to-end encryption, which obscures your data when its sent or received; two-factor authentication (2FA) or multifactor authentication (MFA), which means whoever accesses your email account must know certain information or have access to certain things, such as a mobile device or email address, to get into the account; and Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption, which makes it so that email communications remain secure even when the network, such as a public network used in a library or cafe, is not.
No, there is nothing preventing a business from hosting their website with one provider, and their email on another. Keep in mind that many web hosting companies typically include a free email domain for customers.
Some essential features you will want to have include spam protection for your emails, such as spam filters; the ability to create and have an unlimited amount of email addresses for yourself and your employees; email forwarders for those times when you are away from the office; autoresponders, which can also be used when you are unable to answer your emails and can also be used to answer supply informational responses to any general email addresses that you set up; and webmail software, which allows you to send emails via a web browser. You also want to have large mailbox sizes―preferably unlimited—and the user interface or experience needs to be pleasing to the eye.
There are a few web hosting services available that allow you to send and receive emails at no charge, usually through webmail or POP clients and email or IMAP clients. Some examples of these include Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Gmail. While these sites are free and generally offer a decent amount of storage space for individuals or small businesses, they offer limited cloud storage space that might be needed by medium or large businesses. They usually also have limited security measures in place, limited customer support options and no way to personalise your email address to represent yourself or your business.
Like other providers, the best email hosting providers offer many levels of security. When choosing these providers, you want to look for security features like two-factor authentication (2FA) or multifactor authentication (MFA), documentation that shows frequent security updates and patches, intrusion detection, the monitoring of user activities, data encryption and privacy protection.
The best email hosting provider will depend on the size of your company, the nature of your business, and your budget. However, some of our favourite picks:
