Hi all.

I work in the support team for a kiwi digital agency, and over the past year or so we've received a lot of support questions pertaining to "can you do business email" and "what is email hosting and how much is it?" from small businesses. We've been using Google Apps since we kicked off some 3 years ago, and got a free plan - well, that was lucky as by the time we were recommending clients, the New Zealand pricing was approx US$5/month per email account - this can add up if you are a team! We have continued to use Google Apps and recommend it (probably more because it's free, and not thinking about it objectively), but having just done a review, we found in fact that a lot of local companies provide it for A LOT cheaper than Google Apps - and I personally prefer to support local operators if the service/delivery is as good. To sum up, we then found the prices for NZ-based services were 1/4 to 1/5 the pricing of Google Apps, and there is an excellent FREE PROVIDER called "Zoho" and we tested that out - what a dream, and similar in all functions to Google Apps. We've been exposed to a few international brands when we've dealt with client domains and battled to get simple DNS configured, so we reviewed about 15 providers - the usual names, Spark, Voyager, Vodafone and some others.

Anyway, if you don't want to read the pros and cons of each provider, we've got a good table at the top which sums it up with the pricing:business email hosting review

If anyone knows an email hosting provider we've missed that you swear by, I'd be keen to know about it and can include it in an update. We don't sell any of this stuff as this is not a post to promote our other services - it's just a resource to avoid costly ongoing fees Re: business email - it certainly has shown the disparity in prices for the email service, from FREE to $600 a month!!

I hope this helps, and no, I don't work for Zoho