Preface: I have no idea what I'm doing. I tried to set up a newsletter service through Kit yesterday but didn't realize I needed to own my own email address for sending the emails. I had already purchased a domain name through Cloudflare to use with a future Carrd website that I will be setting up. (FYI I am a newly published author generating almost $0 royalties right now and trying to figure all of this technical stuff out.) I looked into Cloudflare's email option and it was $7/month (again, I'm making no sales yet.)

After researching, Namecheap email hosting seemed like the cheapest option that fit my needs, so I purchased an email service through them using my Cloudfare domain name.

Now - I have no idea how to combine the two, set up DNS (don't even know what that is), or create the actual email address name because Namecheap did not prompt me to do that like I thought it would.

I've tried searching through the help articles on both websites, but I don't understand the lingo so I'm left clueless. Am I even able to use all these different things together?

I've been a customer for over 6 years, originally with Beyond Hosting before ending up at Liquid Web.

Their support used to be genuinely good, which was one of the main reasons I stuck around for so long. But over the years it's just gotten progressively worse. Slow responses, tickets being passed around, and nobody really taking ownership of anything.

Recently had an issue with a server I'd requested to cancel months ago. I'll admit I missed a follow-up confirmation from them, but the way they handled the whole thing afterwards was pretty disappointing. Took multiple follow-ups just to get someone to properly look into it, and even then I mostly got generic responses.

Their pricing also seems completely out of touch with what you're actually getting these days. I finally decided to move everything elsewhere and honestly wish I'd done it sooner. The new setup is faster, considerably cheaper and was surprisingly easy to migrate to.

Bit of a shame really. I used to recommend them, but I definitely wouldn't anymore.

A few months ago I started an open-source benchmark suite (MIT, not affiliated with any provider) that provisions the same sysbench + fio tests on all configured instance-types, then destroys them. It now supports 7 providers and more than 6 months of pricing and performance data.

The latest addition, UpCloud, showed quite good performance, adding another european provider to the top in terms of price/performance. Upcloud also offered the best disk speed I have seen so far for small to medium sized instances.

You can find the dashboard at https://fabianwimberger.github.io/cloud-bench/ and the source + logs under https://github.com/fabianwimberger/cloud-bench - feel free to leave me some feedback or request instances for comparison!