Looking to migrate E-mail Services

[Bahamut Eos]

I am the basic tech support for a small mostly mac only post production business, and we have been having trouble with e-mail outages recently. Because of that we want to move to a new service. E-mail and Servers are not something I know much about from an administrator end.

We currently host two websites, an FTP, and about 50 e-mail accounts, use about 150 GBs of space (mostly e-mail and the FTP), and use about 50-80 GBs a month of bandwidth. We set up a lot of temporary e-mail addresses and then destroy them 2 weeks later, and we have a few accounts with over 25 GBs of mail. So host services that charge by the mail box per month with mail box memory limits doesn't really work for us.

So we are thinking of either:

A: Getting our server (Mac Mini), hiring a consultant to configure and maintain it at mac mini colocation. http://macminicolo.net (we like mac's here)

B: Just getting getting a Dedicated server at a hosting company.


With this info in mind, I would love some suggestions.
Is there another option I'm not seeing?
Can anyone suggest a good hosting company?
Can anyone suggest a good consultant company that can help (do) the migration?
Is it insane to try and maintain our own server given our usage, is it something that needs constant attention, or is it mostly set and forget?
Will we be able to migrate e-mail on the back end, or will I need to go around and help everyone backup their e-mail on user end first? (that will be a giant pain)

Thanks for your time!

 

[miles01110]

Google Apps for Business sounds like a good option for you.

 

[Bobby.e]

Google Apps for Business sounds like a good option for you.

I agree. That is what we use. You get up to 10 for free. If you need more it's $5 a user monthly. My company locked in at 50$ free. We have about 40 employees so for us it is great. I can go in and add and delte users from their website. I can great Distribution Groups and everything.

 

[Bahamut Eos]

I agree. That is what we use. You get up to 10 for free. If you need more it's $5 a user monthly. My company locked in at 50$ free. We have about 40 employees so for us it is great. I can go in and add and delte users from their website. I can great Distribution Groups and everything.

I've see two problems with Google, one is that they charge monthly per user, which get's expensive quick, especially since we create a lot of temporally e-mails, some which exist for less than a month. 50 accounts times 60$ a year is 3,000. Our current costs are more like $720 a year. Also we have a few users with over 20 GBs in their mailboxes, and to my knowledge google's cap on mail box size isn't that large.

 

[ezramoore]

You can create (unlimited) email aliases for free in Google. They can be assigned to a group of people or just an individual.

Google Apps' standard mailbox limit is 25 GB, and more can be purchased on a per user bases for very little.

 

[Bobby.e]

Yes. Its 25gb