Looking for a Web/email hosting service

I’ve had a website for over 20 years and have been with Godaddy for 15. But I’m being squeezed out of my grandfathered hosting and email plan and need to find something else.

I’ve got four domain names and have four websites on my account. Almost everything is static HTML, there are external links pointing to many pages so I don’t want anything to change address. Lots of files can be downloaded from the sites, but traffic is low especially since I retired from teaching and no longer have lecture videos for download.

The real “killer” is Godaddy provided effectively unlimited email hosting, albeit POP, that I rely on with about 6 email accounts and 18 forwarding accounts (not aliases because some forward to other service providers). Godaddy will no long allow adding new addresses (or probably changing current addresses) starting next month and long term they want to eliminate the service altogether and go with Microsoft Exchange, which they sell separately at a price that would be several times what I’m paying now for hosting!

So does anyone know of a reliable hosting service that would do this and not break the bank? (FYI, I’ve found Godaddy very reliable – I haven’t had any outage in many years). Ideally I’d also like HTTPS, but IMAP is not essential.

You’re asking two questions, each of which deserves a thread.

Never use the same company for domain registration, webmail, and/or domain hosting.

For my mail, I’d choose to pay a pro service, eg Fastmail, G Suite, which allow for multiple domain email addresses, and temporary email accounts.

An intriguing option is Apple’s forthcoming Mail upgrade. At WWDC, Apple announced it will be offering randomized, revocable email addresses for iCloud accounts. They gave the example of random sign-ons being automatically available inside iOS apps, but said it will also be available on the web.

Webhosting is a separate can of worms and I don’t think I have enough info to make a recommendation based on the limited info you’ve posted. But if your sites are small and low-volume you might consider something like NearlyFreeSpeech, which has been around nearly two decades and only charges (affordably) for the bandwidth/storage used. I know a someone who set up small static very low volume site there (years ago, admittedly) and the cost per site was something ridiculously low, like $5-$15/year. If you know your storage/bandwidth needs you can figure out what it would cost you using their online estimator.

Been using Bluehost for a few years for simple websites. Pricing is good for our needs, email does actual forwarding as we have various addresses that forward to our me.com addresses. I don’t use https but it is available.

This is actually not a mail ugrade!

It is a security feature as part of the “sign in with apple” so it will not be used for anything else.

I use HostMantis, been very happy with their service. They have a Hosting plan for $2.29 a month that may suit, unlimited Domains and Email addresses

I’ve used Fastmail for several years and have been extremely happy with them.

I have one “account” with them with (essentially) unlimited domains, etc.

Their “aliases” will allow forwarding, it’s not just a matter of everything ending up in one box.

You can get 10% off your first year by using this link.

(Disclaimer: that link uses their referral service, which I’m happy to use but do not depend on at all. I’m happy to pay their full list price, but I’m also happy to pass along a discount to folks who can use it.)

Not according to those articles I posted. They’re expanding upon their current iCloud email aliases in a way that makes it easier to use them (in addition to providing a more secure sign-on).

I think your best and cheapest option is using Linode or Digital Ocean. I’ve heard many stories about how they’re both very affordable, great customer service, and easy to setup. For the sites netlify is potentially an option as well.

Why?

I too have been a happy GoDaddy customer for years. In my case I’m still using their cPanel for mail because it still allows POP and I prefer that to IMAP.

I did end up moving a bunch of domains, their mail and web sites off to inmotion hosting for reasonable fees and lots of features. These are the non-profit sites I am slowly removing from my own account. Next step for me is to move the actual domain registration to the non-profit as well but still at GoDaddy.

If your host/registrar puts a lock on your account due to complaints or billing dispute, you’re totally screwed. And if you ever get mad at your web host and decide to move your site, you’ll also probably want to transfer your domain if it’s registered with the old host. Domain transfers can be annoying, time-consuming, and confusing. But if you’ve registered the domain elsewhere, you don’t have to do anything except update your DNS settings to point to the new host. And if your site got hacked, when domains are separate, even if someone gets access to your files, your domains are safe (assuming you aren’t using the same login and password).

Hover, which is a great registrar (formerly named Tucows) has a good overview on the subject:

Also a good discussion here.

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This year, I moved my email from an old, free Outlook Live account that I forwarded to my iCloud account where I had my calendar and contacts to GSuite for Business. That allowed me to use Google Drive instead of a paid Dropbox account too. I also moved the “front-end” of my website from an Amazon EC2 VM to Squarespace.

I’ve been happy with those decisions. It’s about $300/year though. I still keep files in an Amazon S3 bucket – e.g. PDFs, etc. If you’re just using static HTML files, you might want to look into Amazon S3 as well. I use Cloudflare for my DNS and registrar.

For web Hosting since the sites are static, you can effectively host them for free on GitHub as a page/site with attachments.

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I read the articles and to be sure re-watched some wwdc footage.
Other purposes for the email other than anonymous security option for sign in with apple are not mentioned in either article. And neither was it mentioned anywhere at wwdc that I can see.

Can you point out where it says so in the articles? I might be reading it wrong?

At WWDC it was indicated that aliases in Sign On With Apple is a automated expansion of the current iCloud aliases feature, with current iCloud alias manufacture (for non- Sign In With Apple) made easier. So I’m hoping it will be implemented to allow the same type of easy, automated randomization and creation compared to currently needing to log into iCloud and manually creating aliases.

I agree with you there! I also hope they extend this to be user facing.
But from everything I’ve seen and read it’s just for sign in with apple for now.

Thanks for the additional info. I’m revamping my whole domain/web site/email system, moving a bunch of domains I actually bought for non-profits off into their own accounts, cleaning up and adding email addresses as needed and my hosting comes up for renewal next year so now may be a good time to revisit the whole mess and revamp it.

The problem with this is that links to the pages would be broken. The pages need to be accessible on my domain.

I went with Polarismail, it is a great low-cost email provider in Montreal, Canada. Affordable email hosting and very good support.

For web hosting, I’m still looking (again). I am currently with Stablehost.com. They had a good reputation, but now the service if going downhill. If I had more clients (I also resell hosting), I have been eyeing Knownhost.com

Like others have said, keep them apart. I buy domains from domain Namesilo.com - Ugly interface, but super support and very good pricing for domains.

For 15+ years I’ve registered domains with French registrar Gandi.net (which in 2010 opened a US subsidiary, making payments and tech support easier), after reading about how they at the time offered the most protection to registrants in protecting their customers’ registered domains, and privacy. (From the beginning they offered free WHOIS privacy to customers.) Never had a problem with them, and I currently have around a dozen domains registered through them.

Today Gandi is one of the top 20 or so domain registrars, and domains come with limited free webmail (which I don’t use) and they also offer web hosting (which I don’t use). They use and advocate for open-source software and since 2010 have supported Creative Commons, providing them with free domain registrations and renewals, as well as VPS services. They also support Lets Encrypt, the EFF, Ubuntu, Debian and others… they’re one of the Unixy good-guys. (Earlier this year they got sold to a private equity company, so fingers crossed it doesn’t get messed up.)

Aside from Gandi I’ve heard good things about NameCheap and Hover, and terrible, terrible things about GoDaddy (totally aside from their history of sexist advertising and their previous CEO’s proudly posting a YouTube video of him killing an elephant in Zimbabwe).

You can simply perform a search and replace on the old links so nothing would be broken. And considering it would be under version control you can always revert those changes if the need arises.