Best Email Hosting for Business

Per-seat suites (Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 Business Basic, both $7/user/mo on annual terms at our July 2026 check) bundle email with documents, storage, and meetings. The email is excellent, but you're paying for the whole suite on every seat, every month, whether that seat uses it or not.

Per-seat email-first providers (Fastmail Basic, $3/user/mo billed annually) sell email, calendars, and contacts as the whole product. You keep per-user simplicity and roughly halve the per-seat cost — and Fastmail publishes no first-year promo, so the renewal price is the sticker price.

Flat-fee independents (MXroute $59/yr for 10 GB, Migadu from $19/yr) drop per-seat billing entirely: unlimited domains and mailboxes against a storage or volume cap. For a five-mailbox business, MXroute costs less per year than a single Google Workspace seat.

A five-person team over three years at standard rates: Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 ≈ $1,260. Fastmail Basic ≈ $540. MXroute ≈ $177 total — it doesn't care how many mailboxes you create. That spread, roughly 7×, is the entire decision for a team that only needs email.

The honest counterweight: the suites bundle real value if you use it — shared drives, Meet or Teams, device management, and admin controls that email-first providers don't try to match. The question is never 'which is cheapest' but 'what are we actually using.'

Every provider on this page supports correct SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configuration, and that DNS work — plus your own sending behavior — determines whether your mail lands in inboxes far more than the provider's brand does. We would not choose between these five on deliverability grounds, and we treat any vendor claiming a deliverability advantage with suspicion.