Hosted email for custom domains compared - Workspace, Microsoft 365, Zoho, Proton, WorkMail

Putting email on your own domain sounds like a weekend DNS task. In practice it is a small distributed system with a twenty-year legacy. MX routes inbound mail. SPF lists who may send for your domain. DKIM signs messages. DMARC ties the story together and tells receivers what to do when something does not line up. Skip or miswire any layer and you get silent failures, spam-folder burial, or both. This article compares the five hosted options I see engineers actually choose - Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Zoho Mail, Proton Mail, and AWS WorkMail - with rough USD prices, setup friction, and honest when to pick what advice. Why providers beat rolling your own You can run Postfix or Exim on a VPS. You should not unless you sell email infrastructure. IP reputation, PTR, bounce handling, backscatter, and greylisting eat weekends. Managed hosts amortize that pain across millions of mailboxes. For a personal domain or a small team, paying a few dollars per seat is cheaper than your hourly r