DNS, Web Hosting and Email

As is evident from these pages, we have a DNS (mclements.net), host a web site, and email on our DNS. We've had this for about 15 years. Started with Register.com, then used GoDaddy for a few years. The time came to renew and GoDaddy wanted about $145 for 2 years. Our GoDaddy experience was good, but it had some limitations:

  • Hosting Storage: limited to 10GB unless you pay more
  • Hosting Features: support for Wordpress and others cost extra
  • Email storage: about 100MB to share across all accounts
  • Email POP3 only: cost extra to enable IMAP

    • I looked at some alternatives and ended up with Arvixe, as you can see if you 'whois' this DNS.

    Arvixe addresses all of the above limitations of GoDaddy:

  • Hosting Storage: unlimited
  • Hosting Features: includes Wordpress and others
  • Email storage: unlimited
  • Email IMAP: included

    • The cost is also lower: $96 for 2 years.
    The support is comparable: both respond quickly via email and have 24 hour phone support.

    Of these improvements, I find IMAP email to be the best. We'd been using POP3 for 15 years and got used to the limitations. Key benefits of IMAP include:

    Multi-device: IMAP has one consistent list of which emails you've read, stored at the server. When you access the same email account from multiple devices, this list remains consistent. When using different devices, you don't need to wade through the same emails you've already read to find new ones. This is a big improvement over POP3, in which each device separately stores its own list.

    Goodbye, self-BCC: on POP3 if you want to see emails you sent from different devices, you need to BCC yourself else they'll never appear on other devices. With IMAP, the sent folder is synchronized across all devices so you don't need to do this.

    Spam management: on POP3 you need to access the email server directly from a browser (not from your email client) to access the folder where it stores Spam, in order to see what's being flagged as Spam and see if there are any valid emails in there. With IMAP, the server Spam folder is synchronized across all devices so you can access and manage it directly from the email client on any device.

    Synchronized deletes: when you delete emails on IMAP they go to the server Trash folder, which is synchronized just like all other server folders. Thus any email you delete, from any device, goes to the same place. It can be seen and managed directly in the email client on any other device.

    Email refresh: IMAP can use the Idle command to notify clients when emails arrive, instead of having to poll the server periodically like POP3 does.