Heyhey!
My fiance has been struggling with lack of space in his current email, plus his current provider (web.de) doesn’t have the most professional name, which is bothering him because he’s currently applying for jobs.
So I was looking to get him a nice clean email for Valentine’s, that has a simple name and enough space for a while.
Problem is - I’m kinda dumb and have very little idea of how web hosting and email work (despite working as a Software Engineer…). So I could use some input on what steps I should be taking to get what I’m looking for while avoiding the pitfalls and hidden costs that some service providers have.
So far, I’ve found a nice {hisLastname}.cc domain on namecheap for 50€/10 years. Namecheap also offers a basic email service for 14€ per year, altough I’m not sure whether 5GB is enough space. The next higher email would be 40€ per year for 30GB of space. That seems more like what I’d be looking for, but also seems a bit expensive?
Does anyone have tips on where else I might want to look? How expensive would it be to just run my own email server? Getting a little homeserver rack has been a goal in our hosehold anyways, we just haven’t had the time to look into what exactly to get.
What would I do once the domain (and maybe email service) is bought? Like, what does the migration from existing services look like? Would I have to set up specific software anywhere just to access the mails?
Way back 2008-2012 I had a server running on a “slice”, the early virtualization tech. Since I was running a complete linux system, having outgrown shared or managed hosting, I figured I’d run my own mail server.
It mostly worked fine but overall was way more work than it was worth. It’s complex software. You can end up dealing with misconfigurations that are tough to figure out, spam bans, security threats, and the worst for me - upgrades that break everything and then you don’t have email u til you spend hours fixing it. And since it’s complex, and that would only happen once a year or so, it took a lot of effort since I wouldn’t remember what I did last time.
So, I ended up switching to a mail host. Way easier, works all the time. If there’s a problem they get to be the ones to fix it, and they’re surely better at that than I am since I didn’t set out to be a mail server specialist.