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  1. #1
    Join Date
    May 2008
    Posts
    257
    Some time ago after I had setup my reseller hosting account, I really wasn't happy with the webmail clients that were available to my customers so I did some searching to see if there was such a thing as an email-only host where I could get email accounts on a domain-name basis.
    All I really found were companies who offered indiviual email accounts for as much as $3-$4 per month, for each account.
    I guess I was being naive about it, but it seems to me that would be a fairly simple business to setup because it's far less complicated than offering full-blow hosting, it's just email.
    Any comments?

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Apr 2005
    Location
    Cochin
    Posts
    2,452
    Most email only companies employ enterprise level servers such as exchange or customized qmail. They target a minority of customers, and hence are sometimes priced high.

  3. #3
    In this case, the licensing cost is what raises the cost. And, usually they take steps to specifically make their platform redundant.
    Like Exchange for example, it's pretty expensive, and so the host has to pass that cost to you.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Feb 2004
    Posts
    633
    You might want to take a look at Rackspace's Mailtrust division. Accounts start at $1.25 per account per month for 1GB (and go down from there based on volume or prepayment), it has a pretty solid webmail interface, you can mix and match Outlook users in the same domain, etc.
    I'm not so sure I agree that email hosting is "far less complicated" than full blown hosting. Aside from the fact that it requires essentially the same infrastructure, business class email hosting pretty much requires realtime replication and backups, which unmanaged hosting providers aren't doing. Dealing with the amount of data generated by tens of thousands (or more) email accounts is not trivial. The CTO of Mailtrust posted some info on how they deal with the large amount of data they need to index:
    http://highscalability.com/how-rackspace-now-uses-mapreduce-and-hadoop-query-terabytes-data
    I'd venture to guess that most hosting companies (excepting perhaps the largest managed hosting providers that do architectural consulting) don't have the sort of architectural and development talent on staff to accomplish something similar.

  5. #5
    It really depends on your target market and what you want to offer to them.

    For example, I have seen some "mail only" accounts that start at $99/month.

    Why would any company want to pay $99/month for a single email account? Well.. I suppose if they needed the features it was offering, etc...

    So because you can say if this is a good idea or not for you... you really need to define what you want to offer, and to whom you want to offer it.

    I would not recommend offering "cpanel email-only" accounts as a business, since you would be competing against places like bluewho/hostgator/1and1/etc.. that would blow you out of the water with their unlimited disk and super-cheapo pricing.

    But if you plan to target the high-end market who needs high quality and reliable email hosting... and you know how to actually market properly to those types of businesses... then go for it. There certainly is a demand for this high level of service, but it is NOT an easy market to crack open.
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  6. #6
    Yes there is good idea. For example messagelabs.com have a lot of customers.

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