At $1 per email account per month we’ve always lost a lot of money on the email hosting side of our business. In fact most hosting businesses of our size long ago abandoned email hosting altogether because it’s so hard to do well and is such a money loser. And nearly all of the huge providers – Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc – simply do not provide phone support for email. Why? When done right there is simply no other hosting service which requires anywhere close to the amount of support, knowledge, and hardware that email hosting requires.

Here are are few of the things that go into hosting email:

• Email delivery requires pristine IP reputation. Every minute of every day hackers and spammers are trying to break into every email account on the internet to send spam and phishing emails. If any of our users emails accounts are compromised and used to send spam our mail servers IP addresses will be blacklisted which then comprises the ability of all of our users to get their emails delivered. So we’ve spent years (decades even!) honing our anti-hacker and anti-spam systems to protect our users, and more importantly, protect our mail servers IP reputation. As a result our mail servers reputation and delivery is exceptional.
• Email support requires lots and lots of phone calls and, um, emails. Of all of the hosting services we provide email hosting requires the most support of any of them. It’s also our least expensive service. And despite our myriad of self-help documentation most people prefer to call us and have us walk them through connecting their newest phone or look at an email bounce message with them. We’re one of the few hosting companies left that you can call and immediately talk to a human for your email support.
• Email requires a lot of expensive hardware. There is no other service that demands the reliability of email hosting and there’s nothing that blows up our phone lines faster than an email outage. As a result it takes clusters of servers to process all of your email, filter the spam, and provide the redundancy needed so that your email is all always online and fast.
• Inflation is real and our support staff is amazing. Our costs for the hardware needed to keep our servers and networks running has increased well over 10% in the last year. And in order to prevent inflation from lowering the real wages that our amazing staff bring home we’re providing raises to them that negate what inflation has taken from them, ensuring that when you call or email you’ll still get the same fantastic, friendly and knowledgeable humans on the other end of the line.

Most all hosting providers are raising costs across the internet. And while we fully understand that us being another of the many businesses that are passing these inflationary cost increases on to you is painful, we’re a small business with low margins that would not be able to weather inflation without it. We’re also committed to not raising any of our rates for any of our other services. And with this increase you are helping keep our fantastic staff answering your phone calls and continuing to support the servers and networking gear required to keep everything at Brownrice humming.

Email hosting will increase from $1 per month to $2 per month on June 1st, per email address.

Thank you.