So as I mentioned in my previous post, I’m moving to a new e-mail host. Since about 2006, my personal domain e-mail has been hosted at GoDaddy. For this privilege, I started paying about $4 a year. This has gone up steadily where eight years later, I paid $8 last year to renew my e-mail hosting plan. The plan is up for renewal at the end of this week, so on the weekend, I decided to renew. After logging into my hosting account, I discovered the renewal few had gone up to $48. As far as I could see, no new functionality had been added. I was just going to pay a lot more for the same level of hosting.
It took two phone calls but I finally discovered GoDaddy is trying to move all their e-mail hosting clients to their new Office 365 platform. I don’t need fancy things like Office application integration across the cloud. They’ve jacked up the prices of their existing e-mail platform, hoping everyone will just move over to the new one since the prices are now so similar. Well, I wasn’t having any of that. I decided to move to a new e-mail host. They are many different companies to choose from. Some companies are competitors to GoDaddy who also do domain registration and web/e-mail hosting. Others just host e-mail. The price also varies from company to company.
I quickly chose a company that offers a free account with a lot of options. I get 5 Gb of storage for my e-mail, compared to the 1 Gb on GoDaddy. There’s also acronyms like IMAP access but let’s not talk about that. Moving e-mail hosts is actually pretty easy if you don’t care about your old e-mails. This is where the difficult part comes. I had to move over 3300 e-mail messages from my existing account to this new server. It was part manual labour and part automation. It went smoothly but I was nervous. I need to repeat the process for my “Sent” items and then again for any other folders I might have.
The last part then involves redirecting all my new incoming e-mails to my new host. It’s quite an interesting process. If any of you own your domains, you might have to go through this yourself one day.