Using email service from your webhost - your experience
 

For those who use the email service offered by your webhost, what is your experience? I read a lot of articles saying that it's not ok to use the email service that comes with a webhosting package, but nobody said why.

For a personal domain I am using my webhost for email and in the last 3 years I can say that it was as reliable as tuffmail. No email lost, no delays, no spam fals positive. What is the downside of this, because I wasn't able to find any?

Don’t do it , for instance, I used ovh webbings/ email for one of my domains, I didn’t get one email recent days.
Because ovh idc got outage due to fires.

Surely it's like everything else? There's good and bad hosting companies. The bad are those who put too many sites on a single hosting computer, don't configure things properly, and have techs who don't understand the ins&outs of their systems and don't care and won't dig into problems people have. Probably a fair number of the cheapest web hosts are like this.

Then there will also be a smaller number of good companies - those who fully understand their systems and maintain them properly... but charge accordingly.

The main reason not to use your web host's email is so that some catastrophic problem at one service won't bring down the other. These types of outages are not all that uncommon. In general, if a company specializes in a particular area, such as email, they focus on maintaining and improving what brings in the biggest portion of their revenue. I find it interesting how often I am contacted by business people who use Gmail even if they have a very professional looking website. Same for Microsoft 365--lots of businesses use it for email even if their website host probably provides email.

I think the main objection to put all eggs in one basket (domain registration + email + hosting all with the same company) is that if there is an issue somehow, your site and email won't function. If you use a different company for each of them, it isn't as bad as when your hosting and email are both down simulataneously.

That said, I have my doubts myself. I have several domainnames, and am tempted to buy webhosting at the same company. So far I've always used URL forwarding, but I doubt it looks professional. I could of course buy web hosting separately and then link the domain to it while still having a separate webhost and domain registrar (instead of having one company for both) but I'm not sure if that makes sense. I'll probably be paying more and with more technical concerns than if the domain registrar hosts the website too and everything is automatically configured.

As for email and webhosting, in a way the same concern as for domains and webhosting. If your email host is different than your webhost, downtime of one of them won't affect both email and site, but isn't the risk of simultaneous downtime low enough that it justifies having hosting and email at the same company? The benefit is that you have the same domainname for website and email, which many companies consider to be more professional. I guess you can use a Gmail or Outlook.com domain instead, depending on how (un)professional you consider that to be.

In my earlier answer I suppose I forgot business users. But if you include them there's a range of possible approaches, depending on the scale of the business. I mean, a sole trader likely operates mail and a website not much different from some personal users, but the international company down the road with employees in every country are going to have (probably) their own infrastructure...


It's not so much "domain registration" that's the issue, surely, as who hosts the DNS records?

If either your email host or web hosting company has an outage, in both cases recovery will need the DNS records changed to point to wherever you move hosting to.


I don't see why web- and mail- hosting would need to be at the same place. Surely the DNS records for your domain can point at different hosting companies? There's no reason why that wouldn't work for a single domain name, is there? The MX records specify one (or perhaps better, several mail hosting companies so there's fallback if the primary is offline) and the website is elsewhere.