I used to host my own mail server for about two years. I learned a lot in the process on how I can set up a mail server and get everything to work. One day I got fed up with looking after it so I decided to move my emails to a shared hosting provider. I passed on the responsibility of looking after my emails in terms of hosting, setting up DKIM, SPF, DMARC, dealing with blacklisting etc.

That shared hosting provider is OK, but I noticed that sometimes I can't get to my emails because there is a timeout issue, which never happened when I hosted them myself. I understand that it's a shared service, therefore performance won't be great, but I didn't think it'd be that bad.

I want to move my emails somewhere, where I don't have to think about them. I have a few domains that I'd need to run emails on. I also don't want to spend way too much money.

I looked around but haven't found anything that would suit me, other than 1and1's shared hosting option, which includes hosting emails. I don't know how good they are as I don't know anyone who is their customer.

What do you think? Do you have any suggestions? Do you host your own email in any way or do you prefer using Gmail/Hotmail etc? I'd appreciate any feedback/comments you might have.