I'm coming from a background of paying a hosting company X amount per month for a server. This server comes with IIS, WebsitePanel and Smartermail all bundled together. When I create a new domain using WebsitePanel it automatically creates my email account. All I then need to do is configure my DNS to point to the server.

I've decided that it is more cost efficient to move to AWS / Azure.

Has anyone come from a similar background and moved onto a cloud system? I'd be interested to know what you did regarding emails. So far, these are the suggestions I've seen:

• Use Google Apps for each domain
• Use something like Elastic Email to sent out emails
• Launch a new instance and host an email server on that

The first option seems like quite a lot of manual configuration, the second one works good with outgoing emails but what about receiving? Option 3 would make it less cost effective.

What is your experience?