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> Certainly until today the $ size of the addressable market in the small business email space was practically $0 given Google's position. Rackspace Mail (form

> Certainly until today the $ size of the addressable market in the small business email space was practically $0 given Google's position. Rackspace Mail (formerly MailTrust) has about 200k paying customers for small business e-mail hosting. I've been paying them to host mail on 8 of my domains for years -- Gmail was never appealing to me for various reasons -- so the 24/7/365 support, daily backups and 100% uptime SLA easily made MT/Rackspace the right choice. It's $2 per mailbox per month, or less than half Google's price, but there's a minimum of $10 a month -- so it's only cheaper if you have at least a couple mailboxes/users. As an aside, Google also gives away web analytics for free, yet there's still a billion dollars a year spent at other web analytics firms. There are always ways to compete with free.

toomuchtodo 14y ago
I just helped several companies move to Google Apps from Rackspace over the weekend; their web interface is horrible and Google provides a much better experience on mobile (both iOS and Android) than Rackspace ever could.
- dangrossman 14y ago
  That only matters if you care about the web interface. Lots of businesses don't, they're all on Outlook. I use Thunderbird (IMAP); I've literally never logged into Rackspace's webmail client.
  - toomuchtodo 14y ago
    One of the companies specifically migrated to avoid MS licensing costs (i.e. moving from Outlook to Chrome for the mail interface, Docs on the web/LibreOffice on the desktop).
    - Locke1689 14y ago
      The take away? You're always gonna pay. Somehow, somewhere, you're gonna pay. Might as well make sure you're getting a good deal rather than hunt for the free lunch. I expect Google will find some way to encourage me to upgrade my legacy free Apps account over the next year. Edit: And I just realized that my Google Plus account is tied to my Google Apps account. If they raise prices on me I'm screwed.
      - g-garron 14y ago
        Start migrating your circles to a gmail account :)
      - X-Istence 14y ago
        I decided fairly early on to not use my Google Apps account for my Google+ because I figured that in the future I'd want to have the ability to migrate elsewhere without losing all my Google+ stuff...
  - gcb 14y ago
    > That only matters if you care about the web interface or price. as was the main point of this thread.
  - wyck 14y ago
    The 2$ plan does not sync with anything. The 3$ plan only sync's mobile with webmail (big woop). For "real" business email you need rackspace exchange which is 10$ a month per user, this adds up very quickly with a lot of users.
dotBen 14y ago
so, as it happens Bill Boebel (one of the founders of MailTrust/WebMail.us) is an investor and board member of my startup WP Engine ;) To be fair, Google Apps for Business didn't get going until 2007 which is also the year Rackspace acquired WebMai.us. I'd say the market for B2B email contracted severely the moment Google Apps's free offering became established.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
riobard 14y ago
100% uptime SLA? Really?
- corin_ 14y ago
  Why not? SLA generally just means they'll pro-rate a refund for the downtime, so even if they only achieve 99% over a year it won't cost them a huge amount.
  - riobard 14y ago
    That's not the point. The point is NO ONE can promise 100% uptime. One can promise a 99.999% uptime and refund for the downtime. If one promises 100% uptime, either he's lying or he's just stupid.
    - Erwin 14y ago
      I don't know the details of the email SLA, but for infrastructure: power, networking etc. on our hosted Rackspace servers, we have a 100% SLA. And it's not a lame prorated thing: they pay 5% of the monthly cost back for 30 hours of downtime. So 99% power/network uptime in a month would cost them 70% of what we pay per month. http://www.rackspace.com/managed_hosting/support/servicelevels/managedsla/ http://www.rackspace.com/managed_hosting/support/serviceleve...
    - corin_ 14y ago
      An SLA isn't about promising what they will deliver, not really, it's about what they will deliver if they want to keep 100% of the customer's payments.

toomuchtodo 14y ago

I just helped several companies move to Google Apps from Rackspace over the weekend; their web interface is horrible and Google provides a much better experience on mobile (both iOS and Android) than Rackspace ever could.

dangrossman 14y ago
That only matters if you care about the web interface. Lots of businesses don't, they're all on Outlook. I use Thunderbird (IMAP); I've literally never logged into Rackspace's webmail client.
- toomuchtodo 14y ago
  One of the companies specifically migrated to avoid MS licensing costs (i.e. moving from Outlook to Chrome for the mail interface, Docs on the web/LibreOffice on the desktop).
  - Locke1689 14y ago
    The take away? You're always gonna pay. Somehow, somewhere, you're gonna pay. Might as well make sure you're getting a good deal rather than hunt for the free lunch. I expect Google will find some way to encourage me to upgrade my legacy free Apps account over the next year. Edit: And I just realized that my Google Plus account is tied to my Google Apps account. If they raise prices on me I'm screwed.
    - g-garron 14y ago
      Start migrating your circles to a gmail account :)
    - X-Istence 14y ago
      I decided fairly early on to not use my Google Apps account for my Google+ because I figured that in the future I'd want to have the ability to migrate elsewhere without losing all my Google+ stuff...
- gcb 14y ago
  > That only matters if you care about the web interface or price. as was the main point of this thread.
- wyck 14y ago
  The 2$ plan does not sync with anything. The 3$ plan only sync's mobile with webmail (big woop). For "real" business email you need rackspace exchange which is 10$ a month per user, this adds up very quickly with a lot of users.

dotBen 14y ago

so, as it happens Bill Boebel (one of the founders of MailTrust/WebMail.us) is an investor and board member of my startup WP Engine ;) To be fair, Google Apps for Business didn't get going until 2007 which is also the year Rackspace acquired WebMai.us. I'd say the market for B2B email contracted severely the moment Google Apps's free offering became established.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

riobard 14y ago

100% uptime SLA? Really?

corin_ 14y ago
Why not? SLA generally just means they'll pro-rate a refund for the downtime, so even if they only achieve 99% over a year it won't cost them a huge amount.
- riobard 14y ago
  That's not the point. The point is NO ONE can promise 100% uptime. One can promise a 99.999% uptime and refund for the downtime. If one promises 100% uptime, either he's lying or he's just stupid.
  - Erwin 14y ago
    I don't know the details of the email SLA, but for infrastructure: power, networking etc. on our hosted Rackspace servers, we have a 100% SLA. And it's not a lame prorated thing: they pay 5% of the monthly cost back for 30 hours of downtime. So 99% power/network uptime in a month would cost them 70% of what we pay per month. http://www.rackspace.com/managed_hosting/support/servicelevels/managedsla/ http://www.rackspace.com/managed_hosting/support/serviceleve...
  - corin_ 14y ago
    An SLA isn't about promising what they will deliver, not really, it's about what they will deliver if they want to keep 100% of the customer's payments.