MXroute email hosting review

Are you looking for the best value, low-cost, NO-BS, no-frills, email hosting?

…then MXroute is your friend!

If you haven’t heard of MXroute, then please give me a minute to laugh at you. Now telling all my friends to point fingers at you chanting “SHAME!…SHAME!…SHAME!”

Here’s why…

The quirky things to know (and love) about MXroute

It’s run by Jarland Donnell and Ryan Arp.

Several years back (can’t remember if it was 3 or 5), Jarland caused quite the storm on webhosting admin forums chatting about his new email service. It was basically ONE man’s crusade to offer a low-cost no-frills email service alternative to the overly expensive G-Suite.

To compare:

• G-Suite costs $5/month per email account. Promising great deliverability AND spam blocking.
• MXroute had $30 lifetime plans where you could have unlimited email accounts and send as many emails as you want (within reasonable limits). Also promising great deliverability and spam blocking.

What really stood out at first was Jarland’s no-BS attitude.

I loved the way he spoke and while he doesn’t talk like me (diction-wise), his business attitude resonated strongly with mine. I can’t remember exactly what was said (you can look it up for yourself), but it was things like…

• This is our service, we want it to be no maintenance for us. And low-cost for you. Everybody wins.
• If you make any support tickets, we’ll answer promptly ONLY IF it’s a critical issue and our fault. Otherwise, we’ll take our sweet time.
• We reserve the right to cancel your account for reasons such as sending spam, submitting 2 tickets for the same issue, etc. We’ll refund you right away and never want anything to do with you again.
• Our servers are definitely maintained to be low-cost and highly efficient but we do have occasional downtimes. Most likely, you’ll never notice them.
• If you’re not sure you like our service, please don’t buy.
• Please read MXroute’s policy to get a sense of Jarland’s no-BS diction.

Whatever questions (smart or dumb) that people had regarding MXroute, Jarland effortlessly swatted them away with straight-to-the-point answers. While Jarland was quite blunt, he spoke to the heart of many admins. We didn’t want something flashy and expensive, and to pay for bullshit gimmicky features we never needed. We just needed something worked, was reliable, and backed by someone who cares.

The only question was…could MXroute really deliver?

It wasn’t like they promised the world. Jarland definitely didn’t (to say the least). But even still…what he promised seemed like 2 dreamlands away from the current email landscape. I mean, even Gmail gets hit with spam. How the heck does Jarland’s spam-blocking algorithm compete with a billion dollar company?

Every admin already knew how he was gonna do it, too. It’s not a hard business model to reverse engineer in your head.

• MXroute was probably going to lease out lower performance dedicated servers with tons of large (but slow) drives. Perfect cost savings for a low performance task like email hosting.
• Attain high deliverability via a strict user policy. Anybody caught sending spam gets booted immediately. Over time, they’d easily attain high reputation scores across all servers.
• Then block incoming spam by manually altering their algorithms as needed.
• (I’m sure there might be a few other email hosting industry secrets as well.)

I mean…THAT IS…the best way to do it. Every admin knows this. Just none ever had the time (beyond more critical webhosting issues). And there really wasn’t an affordable way to hire someone else to do that for you. We were stuck between paying for super expensive G-Suite or using crap webhosting servers where admins don’t care as much about spam-blocking or email deliverability. Not to mention, you’re sharing the server with hundreds (or thousands) of low-skilled crap tenants.

So…how did it go?

MXroute had a box office hit.

Nobody knows how they do it. Crazy cheap pricing (especially on the lifetime plans). The service is solid. My emails get through (even past the most difficult Microsoft O365 servers). I have tons of accounts. I don’t receive such crazy amount of spam (certainly less than on Gmail). And the servers work reliably all year long.

I’m not the only success story either. At first, many admins were terrified to trust their critical businesses to a 1-man or 2-man email hosting company. But then the raving reviews kept pouring in. And STILL pouring in even years after their launch. MY experience was no different. 3 years later, I’m happy as a clam. I almost forgot how difficult life was before MXroute came around.

Services like MXroute make you believe again, that 1 or 2 determined people can do a better job than entire companies with massive budgets (but no soul).

Are there any “catches” or limitations?

Not really. If you wanted, you could argue that they don’t give such crazy amount of space like G-Suite does per email account, or doesn’t come with other cloud-based services like documents and what not. But really…when it comes to essential email function, MXroute is the cheapest (and arguably the best).

To the people arguing their lifetime plans aren’t sustainable, you can read their response.

Any issues with MXroute?

I’ve never experienced any and rarely hear of anyone who has. What I do like however is that MXroute is quite transparent and owns up to it. They almost seem very proud to own up to any bugs or mistakes. And will even tell you to go with another service you’re expecting twenty 9’s or reliability. But honestly…I consider them a 100% uptime service.

Where you can read more about MXroute’s story:

• Interview: Q&A with MXroute Owner Jarland Donnell on Email Delivery, the Hosting Industry and a look back – LowEndBox
• MXroute – e-mail hosting starting at $5/year with 2GB storage in Dallas, USA – LowEndBox
• [MXroute] Alive in 2018 and giving you 2 years of service for $30 (recurring) – LowEndBox

Just read the responses and you’ll get a feel for how they operate. It’s perfectly up my alley. I operate exactly the same way for my businesses.

Yes, everyone should get MXroute

• So cheap and each plan can have unlimited domains and email accounts. I think unlimited sending too (although I’m sure there’s gotta be some rate limit if you’re sending too many).
• The only “limitation” would be space. But the space they sell is still cheaper than G-Suite.
• It has all the typical email protocols. SMTP, POP3, IMAP, and also webmail interface.
• Their webmail interface is nice, feels and functions a lot like Gmail.
• Yes…I’m aware of bad reviews of people complaining about their accounts being closed, or other issues. That is not the typical experience. It’s just cry-baby high maintenance customers trying to hurt MXroute’s PR because they got punished for breaking TOS. MXRoute is extremely popular among pros and trusted!

MXroute.com – go get it while they still have lifetime plans.