Best Email Hosting Services of 2025

What is an email hosting service?

An email hosting service enables you to set up a new email account, create a custom email address, send emails, and store your messages. It controls everything from how quickly your messages are sent and received to how big your attachments can be.

You can find both free and paid email hosting services, depending on your needs. Free services typically come with smaller inbox and attachment size limits as well as fewer features. Still, you can find free encrypted email and free unlimited storage accounts.

Paid email hosting services may offer larger attachments, let you set up email addresses at a custom domain, or even enable encrypted email messaging.

Who needs an email hosting service?

If you want to send and receive email, you need an email hosting service. This is regardless of whether you want to get a free email address or set up a business email at your domain. After all, the messages that you send and receive need to be stored on an internet-connected server somewhere.

Hosted email vs. self-hosted email vs. shared web and email hosting

When it comes to choosing an email hosting service and opening a new email account, you have a few different options.

Hosted email services let you rent out an entire email server. This type of service, which enables you to create one or more private email addresses, is optimized for performance and security. You don’t need to share your server’s computing power or storage space with anyone else. Importantly, hosted email eliminates the work of setting up and maintaining your own servers—the email hosting service takes care of that for you.

Self-hosted email is a lot like hosted email. The difference is that instead of renting out servers from another company, you purchase and maintain your own servers and create email accounts on your own. This requires a team of IT professionals, so self-hosting email can be expensive. However, it also offers maximum control over your email system and gives you flexibility to upgrade your email hosting over time.

Shared web and email hosting are hosted email services in which servers are used by many different individuals or businesses. You can still create new email addresses at your own domain. However, since the server is shared, you’ll only get access to a fraction of the storage space and computing power it has available. Shared email hosting is much less expensive than either hosted or self-hosted email services if your goal is simply to make a new email.

What are the benefits of a hosted email for my business?

There are a number of benefits of using hosted email for your business.

First, hosted email gives you excellent performance and security. Since your business is the only organization using your email server, you can take advantage of all the available computing power to send and receive mail. That’s important for large businesses with many people sending and receiving emails, especially if those emails contain large attachments.

In addition, hosted email is flexible. If you need more storage space or more computing power in the future, your email host can simply connect another server to the one you’re already using. More important, that connection can be temporary—so you can scale your email capacity up and down based on your business’s needs. While scaling up self-hosted email is possible, it’s expensive and there’s no easy way to scale back down.

Another benefit of using hosted email for your business is that you can create an unlimited number of new email addresses at your custom domain. As a result, it’s easy to make an email for every employee at your organization, as well as to open email accounts for general purposes like customer support or sales.

Finally, using hosted email gives your business control over managing your email system. You can decide how big the maximum attachment size is for every new email address. You can also set up encryption or filters for organizing incoming mail.

What features should you look for in an email hosting service?

There are many different features to consider when comparing the best email services.

Custom domains

One of the first things to check is whether an email hosting service will let you create email addresses at a custom domain. Having the ability to create an email address at your domain is especially important for the best business email hosting. Custom domains make your company look more professional than simply using Gmail or Yahoo! domains.

Price

Email hosting can range from free to very expensive depending on what you need. It’s worth comparing prices across email hosts, especially if you can take advantage of an introductory offer.

24/7 support

When you’re having trouble sending and receiving emails or can’t create an email account, it’s important to be able to get in touch with your host quickly to find out what’s going on. Many of the top email hosts offer 24/7 live chat and phone support. At some hosts, you may find that paid email hosting plans offer priority support.

Anti-spam, anti-malware, and phishing detection

Email hosting services often feature automated tools to clean up your email and prevent you from being attacked with malware. These anti-spam, anti-malware, and anti-phishing systems are designed to filter out malicious messages before they ever reach your inbox. In most cases, you can customize these filters to more precisely control what’s allowed to pass through and what’s filtered out.

Mailbox storage

The amount of storage space per email account is a major consideration when choosing an email hosting service. That’s especially true if you get a lot of email or frequently send and receive large attachments. After all, you don’t want to have to create a new email address just because your mailbox is full.

Many paid email hosting services now offer unlimited mailbox storage. However, free services typically have storage limits.

Cloud storage

Some email hosting services also include cloud storage, giving you a way to store more than just emails. Cloud storage can be used to save attachments, documents, photos, and more. While there are plenty of standalone cloud storage platforms, bundling cloud storage with your email hosting can save you money.

Sending size limits

Most email hosts put limits on how big any single email you send can be. This is important for emails with large attachments, since photos, videos, or even large PDFs can exceed your sending size limits.