I barely use it, but I like having a solid, independent, third-party, basic SMTP host around for when it is useful.
Name me a suggestion. I know 20% or $2 increase isn't much, but I don't want to pay that much for something I barely use, but I need something.
This unwanted fee increase has me jumping ship, not sure where to yet.
Thanks.
I know they absolutely do cull free instances to make capacity for paying customers.
Appears you'd need to go for the $6/m tier + extra fee to use an existing domain that's registered elsewhere? https://www.hetzner.com/webhosting/matrix-mobile/
Also, can't recommend paying 25% more to be billed in USD instead of EUR.
Disclaimer: they sponsor mailcow
I've been using it for a year or so now and haven't had any problems. The support is pretty good, you can email them for reverse dns. €4 per month
If you want a hosted SMTP for your own single domain, and volume is low, consider just using AWS SES. I run betterdev.link with it, send about 20k email per months and pay around $2
If finally you want some nice and easy UI to use for email forwarding and SMTP, consider my email forwarding app https://mailwip.com It was built for this use case.
Edit: my current setup is documented [0], and the older (slightly different) one is linked from it.
[0] https://steady.mooo.com/~defanor/notes/simpler-server-setup....
Now I've been relaying through Mail.baby/Interserver for 18 months or so and it works great. $1/mo base fee + usage. With the <100 mails me and my family send that adds up to $1.01/mo.
https://mailcow.email/ https://www.interserver.net/ https://www.interserver.net/r/926156 (affiliate link)
It is free for up to 100 emails per day.
Happy after IP was off most blocklists, but setup was kinda rough - https://mxtoolbox.com is your friend.
That's probably a reason for the fee increase because $10/month probably doesn't significantly exceed overhead costs at scale.
What I mean is, Rackspace probably has a service standard that exceeds $10/month/customer. Thus $10/month customers would not be worth keeping. Particularly if they are using the services in the way you are (without indications of increasing use to profitable levels).
To double down, customers who will leave for $24/year are always likely to bounce. That's the nature of price sensitive customers.
Good luck.
