6 Best Cheap Email Hosting Providers Under $5/Month 2019

Email hosting providers give businesses access to email addresses they can use to communicate with customers and employees. Many businesses look for email they can get cheaply, so we reviewed more than 20 providers to find the top six under $5/month—including the best overall—based on security, support, and features for the price.

Top 6 Cheap Email Hosting Providers 2019

How We Evaluated Cheap Email Hosting Providers

Small businesses are always in need of safe, reliable, easy to use, and extremely affordable communication tools to connect with customers and communicate among their teams. That’s why we reviewed more than 20 email service providers with offerings of less than $5 per month, and compared their customer support, ease of use, security, and extra features like file storage, email protection, and collaboration tools.

The criteria we used to evaluate the best include:

• Price: We looked for email hosting plans for under $5 per user, per month and prioritized plans that offered more than one email account for under $5 per month.
• Ease of use: Email hosting providers with simple setup, billing, and maintenance topped our list. Additionally, we favored providers with intuitive dashboards that users without extensive technical knowledge can easily navigate.
• Custom email domains: All plans on our list needed to come with custom email domains, such as sarah@yoursite.com, as opposed to third-party branded domains like sarah@gmail.com.
• IMAP and POP support: These options allow you to access email on desktop only (POP) or from multiple devices (IMAP); we preferred providers that offer both.
• Spam and anti-virus protection: We looked for email hosting plans that offer powerful spam and anti-virus protection to help companies avoid email clutter and computer-crashing viruses.
• Security: Email providers that offer SSL or TSL encryption of communication to and from email accounts topped our list; this ensures protection of sender and receiver data.
• Customer support: We sought out providers with customer support that’s knowledgeable, patient, and available 24/7 via multiple communication channels like live online chat, phone, and email.
• cPanel inclusion: cPanel is the industry standard for email and web hosting control panels. A lot of small business prefer cPanels as opposed to proprietary dashboards because it is well organized, uncluttered, and allows users to complete tasks in just a few clicks. For this reason, we preferred providers that use cPanel.
• Domain privacy: We looked for providers that shield domain contact information in public domain databases like WHOIS. This helps prevent spam and hacking.
• Extra features: Many providers offer add-on features that meet a variety of small business needs, including business calendars, group chat, word processing apps, video conferencing tools, and cloud storage for document collaboration. These extras were highly favored in our review.

Based on the criteria above, we believe Zoho Workplace offers the best email hosting features for a reasonable price. Plus, they offer a host of productivity and collaboration tools at no extra cost, meaning companies can use Zoho as their turnkey solution for workplace projects. Plans start at the very affordable price of $1 per user, per month.

Best Cheap Email Hosting for Small Businesses: Zoho WorkPlace

Zoho WorkPlace is an email hosting provider that offers multiple email addresses per account in addition to business productivity and collaboration tools—including calendars, document collaboration, notes, tasks, instant chat, and more—all for $1 per user, per month. For this reason, it best serves businesses looking for a secure and cheap productivity and collaboration suite along with email hosting, like marketing agencies or law and accounting firms.

Zoho Pricing

Zoho’s $1 per month Workplace Lite plan offers one email address, 5GB of storage, 25MB email attachments, email forwarding, domain aliases, Zoho Calendar, and Zoho’s Cliq communication tool. The $3 per month Standard plan moves up to 30GB storage, 30MB attachments, and G Suite integration—in addition to Zoho’s suite of productivity tools.

Zoho Tiered Features

Workplace Lite

Workplace Lite starts at $1 per month and comes with one email account, 5GB of storage, 25MB email attachments, domain aliases, email forwarding, calendars, instant messaging for team collaboration (Zoho Cliq), IMAP and POP access (so you can access email from both desktop and mobile devices), and spam protection (including blacklists and whitelists so you can block spam sources and protect legitimate contacts from being relegated to the spam folder).

With just 5GB of storage, this plan is best for freelancers or startup teams. Teams can collaborate on projects using Zoho Cliq, plus they can use Zoho Calendar to assign project tasks, complete with notes. To save money, users can use one email account to create domain aliases like sales@business.com, then forward those emails to individual email accounts.

Standard

The Standard Plan is $3 per month and offers one email account, 30GB of storage, 30MB file attachments, domain aliases, email forwarding, spam protection, and IMAP and POP access. In addition to 25GB more storage than the Lite plan, it also uniquely offers a long list of collaboration tools like Zoho Writer (word processing), Zoho Sheet (spreadsheets), Zoho Show (presentations), and Zoho Cliq (instant one-on-one or team messaging).

With much more storage than the Lite plan, plus collaboration tools, this plan is more suitable for small teams or agencies than startups or freelancers. Users can collaborate on projects and have enough email storage to keep from having to delete emails with pertinent project details or track records. Further, because Zoho Doc documents are accessible via cloud storage, up to 50 people can use their email addresses to collaborate on them.

Ease of Use

Zoho offers a central control panel you can use to manage your email accounts and account features. In one place, you can set up email aliases, manage email forwarding rules, set policies regarding password strength requirements, buy and set up new domains, manage spam rules and reports, reset forgotten passwords, and more.

Customer Support

Zoho offers 24/7 customer support via email and phone, but not instant chat like Rackspace. They also offer a resources tab from their home page where you can view step-by-step tutorials for all of their email and collaboration tools. Further, you can search for help topics from the search bar under this tab.

What Zoho Workplace Is Missing

Zoho does not offer a free domain name or business website like Bluehost does. They also don’t offer as many collaboration tools like video conferencing and screen sharing in their under $5 plans like Microsoft does. Lastly, they offer much less storage than many providers on this list, including G Suite, Rackspace, and Microsoft.

What Users Think About Zoho Workplace

Users like that they can cut down on collaboration and communication time with Zoho Mail by using their productivity suite, chat, calendars, notes, and more from one account. They also like their free 15-day trial, affordable pricing, and strong spam protection. They wish the control panel was a bit more intuitive.

Where to Find Zoho Workplace

To learn more about Zoho Workplace, visit their home page, click on the “Mail” tab, and then on “Sign Up Now.” Scroll down and click the “Try Now” button, then follow the prompts to start your free 15-day, no-credit-card-required trial. Click here to visit their website.

Visit Zoho Workplace

Best for Email & Web Hosting Under $3/month: Bluehost

Bluehost is a web and email hosting provider that offers a full suite of secure email and web hosting features starting at $2.95 per month. This includes a free domain name, five free email accounts with desktop and mobile accessibility, web hosting, encryption of customer communication, and anti-virus and spam filters to protect sensitive data. It is perfect for businesses needing an affordable turnkey solution for both email and web hosting.

Bluehost Pricing

Bluehost’s Basic plan is $2.95 per month for 36 months, then renews at $7.99 per month. It includes a website and domain name, five email accounts, an SSL certificate, and a money-back guarantee. The Plus plan, which includes unlimited email accounts and storage, is $4.95 per month for 36 months, renewing at $10.99 per month.

Bluehost Tiered Features

Basic Shared Hosting

Bluehost’s Basic Plan offers five email accounts, 100MB of storage, IMAP and POP access, email forwarding, email aliases, and spam filters. Their SpamAssassin detects words, phrases, and formats that indicate spam, then assigns a score to each email regarding how likely it is to be spam. You also get website hosting tools like 50GB of website storage, an SSL certificate, unmetered bandwidth, and a free domain.

With very limited email storage compared to Rackspace’s, and with only one website hosted, this plan is best for freelancers who are setting up a portfolio website and expect a few clients a month to contact them. For example, an e-book writer could build a website portfolio with a contact form for potential clients, then use their extra Bluehost email accounts to set up email addresses for virtual assistants, editors, or graphic designers.

Plus Shared Hosting Plan

Bluehost’s Plus Plan is $4.95 per month and offers unlimited email accounts with unlimited storage, SpamAssassin protection, 35MB attachment sizes, email forwarding, email domain aliases, and IMAP and POP access for single computer or multidevice access. It further offers web hosting features, including unlimited websites hosted, unlimited website storage, unmetered bandwidth, an SSL certificate, unlimited domains hosted, and one free domain.

With unlimited email accounts and storage, unlimited websites, and website security, this plan is best for well-staffed ecommerce businesses—perhaps with multiple websites. They can use website contact forms to easily manage customer communications, and also create and manage email addresses for internal teams.

Ease of Use

The Bluehost Control Panel allows you to manage all your email settings in one place by just using simple fields and one-click actions. Using this control panel, you can add or delete an email account, change an email account password, manage your spam filter settings, and more.

Customer Support

On their “Contact Us” page, Bluehost provides a list of topic-specific contact numbers and chat buttons you can use 24/7. If you have questions about your email accounts or domains, click on the “Technical Support” tab from the contact page and then click on the “General Support” chat button or call the phone number. You can also click the Bluehost homepage “Support” tile, then search to find tutorials or answers to your questions.

What Bluehost Is Missing

Because Bluehost focuses on being a reliable web and email hosting company, they do not offer the collaboration tools Office 365 Business, G Suite, or Zoho Workplace offer. They also offer very little storage per email account compared to providers like Office 365 Business.

What Users Think About Bluehost

Customers like the security and data protection Bluehost hosting plans offer to protect their customers’ sensitive information. They also like that it’s easy to use the control panel to manage email settings and features. They wish Bluehost wouldn’t try to upsell them so much on extra paid features, and they feel that Bluehost’s customer support could be more knowledgeable and responsive.

Where to Find Bluehost

To learn more about Bluehost’s web and email hosting plans, visit their home page and click the green “Get Started” button. There, you can review each plan they offer and what features are included. You can also sign up for a plan with zero risk thanks to their 30-day money-back guarantee. Click here to try one of Bluehost’s web and email hosting plans.

Visit Bluehost

Best for Sending Large Attachments: Office 365 Business

Office 365 Business is an email hosting service and business software provider starting at $5 per month. While they boast many features, they stand out by offering email users very large email attachments. They also feature cloud storage and a suite of collaboration tools. Given these assets, Microsoft Office 365 Business is great for companies that regularly collaborate on large projects or presentations, including marketing, graphic design, and PR firms.

Office 365 Business Pricing

The Office 365 Business Essentials is $5 per user, per month when billed annually. It includes a custom email address, 50GB of storage, anti-spam and anti-virus protection, and business communication and collaboration tools like web-based Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel; calendars; and contact lists.

Office 365 Business Features

The Office 365 Business Essentials plan offers custom email addresses with each account, along with a generous 50GB of storage and 150MB file attachment limit per email. In addition, each plan comes with business productivity and communication tools like calendars, Microsoft Office online, file storage and sharing, and conferencing and live chat capabilities.

Here is a more in-depth look at Office 365 Business Essential features:

Email Accounts

The Essentials plan comes with one email address that uses your website domain name. Each email account has 50GB of storage, which is much more than any other provider on this list. Each user can send attachments of up to 150MB per email.

While Essentials only includes one email address, users can create different aliases to capture topic-specific emails, all of which will be sent to the one email address allotted on this plan. For example, a company might create one email address for billing and one for customer service, then point them all to one email account and create folders to separate them.

Security & Protection

Email accounts come with powerful filtering and anti-virus features to prevent spam and data breaches. In addition, to protect your customers’ private data, each web hosting plan comes with an SSL certificate to encrypt data sent or received via email. Plans also comes with domain privacy, which shields your contact information—including your email address—in public domain databases, thereby reducing email spam.

Accessibility

You can choose whether you want to use IMAP protocol to access your email from any device or POP protocol for more securely accessing your email from just one computer. You can switch between the two via your Microsoft Office 365 admin center.

Additional Features

Email hosting comes with web-only access to Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. You get an impressive 1TB of cloud storage so you can create, edit, and share documents from any device. For further ease of project collaboration, use your calendar to schedule events, send event invites, or set task reminders.

For real-time collaboration, you can host web conferences that include screen sharing and guest access capabilities, or chat with team members on the same domain. You can also make use of the enterprise social networking tool Yammer, which helps you manage projects stored in your cloud storage. Yammer allows you to assign project responsibilities and hold meetings via a social media-like chat environment.

Ease of Use

Each plan comes with an admin center where you can manage settings for each of the features listed above. For email, you can set up new email accounts, change password policies, add and remove domain names, delete a user, manage spam filter settings, set up email forwarding and email aliases, and more. Updating or managing features just requires a few clicks and filling out simple forms.

Customer Support

Customer support is available by phone 24/7. Microsoft assesses each call for severity and responds accordingly. For critical needs that affect your business’ ability to bring in revenue, you can expect a callback within one hour. You can also use Microsoft’s online knowledge base to troubleshoot any issues. On the Microsoft home page, click their “Support” tab, then use the search bar to search for answers to commonly asked questions.

What Office 365 Business Is Missing

The Office 365 Business Essentials plan does not include a free domain or web hosting as Bluehost and 1&1 IONOS do. Unlike Bluehost, they also don’t offer the standard and consumer-preferred cPanel for managing email accounts and domains.

What Users Think About Office 365 Business

Users like that each plan comes with a full suite of communication and productivity tools like calendars, chat, and conferencing tools, as well as reliable email with generous storage for a very affordable price. They don’t like that you can’t download the Office suite for use offline. Also, users noted it can be hard to find and adjust settings for the many features they offer.

Where to Find Office 365 Business

To learn more about Office 365 Business, click on “Buy Office 365” from Microsoft’s home page. From there, click on the “Business” tab to learn about each feature found in the Office 365 Business plan. You can also click on “Support” to explore articles on each feature available under this plan. Click here to get started with Office 365 Business.

Visit Microsoft 365 Business

Best for Ease of Use: G Suite

G Suite is an industry-leading email hosting provider that is extremely intuitive, starting at $5 per user, per month. With an uncluttered interface, straightforward navigation, and built-in collaboration tools, Gmail makes email setup and customization simple. Given these features, G Suite is an ideal email and collaboration solution for non-tech savvy businesses that don’t want to spend a lot of time on email setup or maintenance.

G Suite Pricing

G Suite’s Basic plan is $5 per user, per month. It comes with a secure email account with a custom email domain, calendars, contacts, and 30GB of storage. In addition, team messaging, video conferencing, and cloud storage can all be used in conjunction with email and calendars to schedule appointments to collaborate on team projects.

G Suite Features

G Suite offers easy-to-use email and collaboration tools to help distributed teams stay on the same page. In addition to offering a custom email address, it offers the ability to view email and documents on any device. You can easily create projects in the cloud, then copy their URLs and send them to distributed team members. Gmail also offers robust collaboration tools like calendars, video conferencing, and team chat.

Here’s a more in-depth look at G Suite’s email hosting features:

Email Accounts

One custom email address is included with each Basic G Suite plan. Each G Suite account comes with 30GB of storage and you can send emails with attachments up to 25MB in size. Microsoft Office offers much more storage and larger attachment sizes.

While there is only one email address included in the Basic G Suite plan, you can create multiple email aliases. These can be used to field communication for various departments (billing@yourbusiness.com, for example); received emails can then be separated into folders or forwarded to individual employee email addresses.

Security & Protection

G Suite offers spam filters that send detected spam and phishing messages to a spam folder. You can create approved sender lists to keep non-spam emails from being labeled as such. In addition, for hacker protection, each email account comes with two-step verification to prevent accounts from being accessed by unauthorized users. All emails are also encrypted when in transit and when in your inbox to avoid unauthorized people from viewing them.

Accessibility

G Suite email accounts can be viewed on multiple devices by enabling IMAP settings or on one device by enabling POP settings. You can enable one or the other using your Admin Console.

Additional Features

G Suite specializes in easy-to-use collaboration and file sharing tools for remote teams. Each account comes with the web version of Google Drive. With just a couple of clicks, you can create and edit spreadsheets, slides, forms, and documents, both online and offline. Store them in the cloud so the latest versions are accessible from any device.

Unlike Microsoft’s OneDrive, documents can be easily shared by sending a document URL via email, allowing you to “attach” documents that exceed the file size limits. Anyone with access can edit or comment on them.

For real-time collaboration, use Google Hangouts to engage in private conversations or with entire teams. Dedicated virtual rooms allow you to store projects for team collaboration and threads allow you to chat about them in real-time. Using Hangouts Meet and your email calendar, you can schedule one-on-one or team video conferences and share the link via email or chat to invite participants.

Ease of Use

G Suite stands out for its incredible ease of use across the email platforms and integrated productivity tools. An easy-to-access, uncluttered Admin Console allows users to update email settings as well as the settings for various productivity tools. The layout looks like a collection of standard icons and is set up to allow users to easily complete management tasks both on mobile and desktop devices.

You can use the Console to set up two-step verification for email access, as well as add users, monitor storage usage, reset passwords, wipe devices remotely, receive alerts of suspicious activity, and more.

Customer Support

The paid G Suite plans offers 24/7 support with a live person via email, chat, and phone. To access this support, you must log into your Admin Console and verify you are who you say you are. To do so, click on the icon that represents the type of support you want (phone, chat, or email). You will receive a PIN number that you must provide when you connect with a support person.

What G Suite Is Missing

Unlike Bluehost, G Suite doesn’t offer free domains for setting up custom email addresses. They also provide much less cloud and email storage than the under $5 plans provided by Microsoft Office 365 Business.

What Users Think About G Suite

Users say that, compared to using Microsoft, it’s easier to use G Suite for email and to complete projects across remote teams. They say project collaboration is intuitive and seamless thanks to the use of apps like Gmail, Google Drive, Hangouts Meet, Google Calendars, and Google Hangouts. They don’t like that documents can sometimes load slowly. Also, some users report attitudes from G Suite’s support representatives, while others say they’re friendly.

Where to Find G Suite

To learn more about G Suite, visit their homepage, then hover over their “Features” tab and click “Overview.” Scroll down to explore all G Suite apps. You can also sign up for a free 14-day trial by visiting their pricing page, clicking the “Get Started” button below the plan you’d like to try, and then following the prompts to sign up for it. Click here to get started with G Suite.

Visit G Suite

“We are currently a small business (but growing), and a core part of our marketing strategy is organic online traffic and targeted email campaigns to local businesses. In fact, we A/B tested the impact of a paid hosting email service (we use G Suite, Google’s email platform) and a free email service (Gmail) to see if customers would mind the difference. When marketing materials came from an email with our domain name, we had 39% more conversions and clicks. That was significant, so we only used G Suite email hosting for all employees from that point forward.”

– Avi Sinai, Owner, HM Capital

Best for 100% Uptime: Rackspace

Rackspace is a web, app, and email hosting provider that guarantees users 100% uptime and starts at $2.99 per month. If hosting is interrupted at any point, users get a full or partial month refund, depending on the length of downtime. Given this reliability, Rackspace is ideal for companies that depend heavily on 24/7 site access by customers, including breaking news and medical support sites.

Rackspace Pricing

Rackspace’s Basic plan is $2.99 per month for one account. Each account offers 25GB storage, unlimited email aliases, spam and virus protection, and multidevice email access. For $3.99 per month, the Plus plan offers 30GB of cloud storage, shared calendars and contacts, Microsoft Office access, and team chat. They have a minimum $10 per month purchase requirement.

Rackspace Tiered Features

Basic

Rackspace’s Basic plan is $2.99 per month. It offers an email account with 25GB of storage, 50MB attachments, domain aliases, email forwarding, IMAP support for multidevice access, and spam and virus protection. Unlike Zoho, you cannot limit email access to one computer using POP support. This plan also offers a 100% uptime guarantee. If email is down for more than five hours, you get a refund equal to 5% of your monthly fee per hour of downtime.

Despite its ample storage compared to other basic plans like Bluehost, this plan has many limitations, including no collaboration tools like those offered by Zoho and G Suite. However, its 100% uptime guarantee means you never have to worry about missing customer emails. As such, it is great for freelancers who don’t need to collaborate with team members but that need reliability to communicate with clients who demand quick responses.

Plus

Rackspace’s Plus plan is $3.99 per month. Like the Basic plan, it offers an email account with 25GB of storage, 50MB attachment sizes, domain aliases, email forwarding, IMAP access, and a 100% uptime guarantee. If you buy at least $10 worth of these plans, you get 30GB of cloud storage, shared calendaring (so teams can see employee availability), desktop apps like Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, and instant messaging.

What sets this plan apart is its generous cloud storage, the ability to use Microsoft Word and Excel, and 256-bit encryption on all cloud documents when in transit and in storage. These features, coupled with its 100% uptime guarantee, make this plan best for companies needing to securely collaborate on projects across teams with no lag time, including health care practices and companies delivering breaking news.

Ease of Use

When you sign up for email, an email management section will appear in your control panel. You can then manage your email with just a few clicks. For example, you can manage your filter and blacklist settings, add aliases to your existing email accounts, create group lists for people using your domain, archive email, enable and disable email forwarding, edit company contact lists, and add cloud drive storage to your email accounts.

Customer Support

Rackspace offers 24/7/365 customer support via phone, live chat, and a support ticket system on their Email Control Panel. If you’re more inclined to use a DIY support system, they offer a support site with a ton of searchable articles on Rackspace email topics, including how to plan an email migration, how to access your email on both desktop and mobile devices, and tutorials on how to use their email management system.

What Rackspace Is Missing

Rackspace’s email accounts must be purchased separately for $2.99 per account, unlike Bluehost, which offers five email accounts for under $3 per month. Also unlike Bluehost and 1&1 IONOS, they only offer email—no collaboration tools. Finally, you can’t buy just one email account because they have a minimum $10 per month purchase requirement.

What Users Think About Rackspace

Users like that their email packages are very affordable, there is no fee to migrate your email to their service from another provider, and that each email account comes with generous storage and features for the price. However, they say that Rackspace’s customer support has declined over the last couple of years, and they upsell their customers too much.

Where to Find Rackspace

To learn more about Rackspace email hosting, visit their home page. Then click on “Application Services” from the drop-down menu and select “Email Hosting and Productivity.” Scroll down slightly to find the “Rackspace Email” tile and click “Learn more.” You can even try their business email for free by scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking the “Begin Free Trial” button. Or, click here to start your free trial.

Visit Rackspace

Best No-Frills Email Provider at $1/month: 1&1 IONOS

1&1 IONOS is a web hosting and business applications provider that offers email hosting. They stand out by offering basic and secure email hosting for only $1 per month. This includes spam protection, modest storage, a domain name, and customer support, but very little else. This service is best for companies working with extremely limited budgets, like freelancers and early-stage startups.

1&1 IONOS Pricing

1&1 IONOS offers business email for $1 per month, which includes 25 email accounts, each with 2GB storage. Accounts include spam and virus protection, email forwarding, multidevice access, and 24/7 support. This $1 per month lasts for 12 months, then renews at $2 per month. Other plans renew at much higher costs, and were therefore not considered.

1&1 IONOS Features

1&1 IONOS offers bare-minimum business email features with only one exception—like Bluehost, they offer a free domain when you sign up for email. This allows you to create an email address to match your website address. Other basic features include spam and virus protection, multidevice access, storage, and forwarding addresses. They don’t offer free collaboration or website hosting tools to work alongside your email like Bluehost and Zoho do.

Email Accounts

More generous than others on this list, you can create up to 25 email addresses and accounts using a custom email domain. Each email account comes with 2GB of storage, much less than most providers on this list, including Bluehost, Zoho, G Suite, and Microsoft. 1&1 IONOS also only allows you to send email attachments that do not exceed 6MB in size, which is also much smaller than any other provider on this list.

However, like Rackspace, G Suite, and others, you can set up an email alias, then forward it to another email address. For example, if you set up a billing@company.com email address, you can forward all emails sent to that address to the employee who handles billing.

Security & Protection

1&1 IONOS offers spam filters and an antivirus system to prevent suspicious content from making it to your inbox. If you receive spam, you can use your email control panel to create blacklists of spammers. You can also remove email that has been erroneously labeled spam by assigning their senders to whitelists.

Like Bluehost plans, all 1&1 IONOS plans include domains that come with private registration to keep your contact information from being publicly displayed in the WHOIS database. This helps prevent email spam.

To protect your customers’ private data, 1&1 IONOS complies with data privacy regulations and all emails are protected with SSL and TLS encryption. This keeps hackers from accessing sensitive customer or company data while emails are in transit from one email account to another.

Accessibility

You can set up 1&1 IONOS email addresses in multiple mobile apps, allowing you to read your emails from any device. This only applies to apps that support IMAP accounts, however; 1&1 IONOS does not offer POP access like Bluehost, Microsoft, Zoho, and G Suite offer.

Additional Features

Like Bluehost, with email hosting, you get a free domain name like www.yourbusiness.com, which you can then use to create a custom email domain like name@yourbusiness.com. In addition, $1 per month plans come with web hosting for one website.

Ease of Use

Though not the intuitive and standard cPanel Bluehost offers, 1&1 IONOS’ control panel includes a section dedicated to managing email plans. In this section, you can set up new accounts, manage your spam and anti-virus settings, and view spam reports. Compared to cPanel, this control panel is cluttered and not as well organized.

Customer Support

1&1 IONOS assigns a personal consultant to each customer. Once assigned, you can call, chat, or email them with questions from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern Time daily or ask for a scheduled callback. They also have a help center on the 1&1 website where you can find tutorials for using all 1&1 IONOS products and services. Customers note that many of their problems are often not resolved when contacting customer support.

What 1&1 IONOS Is Missing

Unlike Zoho and Office 365, 1&1 does not offer collaboration tools. Their email storage is also quite limited compared to other providers on our list, and you don’t get a free website like you do when signing up for email hosting with Bluehost.

What Users Think About 1&1 IONOS

Customers like that 1&1 IONOS’ customer service is friendly and the price is affordable for budget-strapped entrepreneurs. However, they don’t like that the control panel is cluttered, making it difficult to find information. They also don’t like that canceling a 1&1 service can be a long and tedious process.

Where to Find 1&1 IONOS

To learn more about 1&1 IONOS’ email hosting services, visit their home page and click on their “Products” tab. From the drop-down menu, select “Professional Website Address.” Scroll down to learn about the features included in each package. You can also call a sales representative 24/7 using the phone icon from their home page header menu. To get started with 1&1 IONOS professional email hosting services, click here.

Visit 1&1 IONOS

Bottom Line: Cheap Email Hosting

An email hosting plan allows you to create a custom business email address like sarah@yourbusiness.com. Most small businesses need a turnkey email solution that’s affordable, so our ranking considered plans that cost less than $5 per month and offer ample storage, security, and extras to make email communication and collaboration easy.

There are plenty of email hosting plans to meet these needs for under $5 per month, but some offer more features than others. Zoho Workplace’s $1 per month plan topped our list by offering 5GB of storage per user, security, and communication and productivity tools like calendars, tasks, notes, and team chat. Click here to try Zoho for free.

Visit Zoho Workplace