Why We Left Google Workspace
(And Never Looked Back)

There is a moment — and if you have been running a small creative business in London for any length of time, you will know it — when you open your email, stare at the screen, and think: hang on. Who exactly is reading this?

Not dramatically. Not in a tinfoil-hat sort of way. Just quietly, the way Basil Fawlty quietly suspects that something is not quite right at the hotel, before the entire ceiling collapses on a Spanish waiter.

The answer, of course, is that Google does not have a little man in Mountain View sitting with a cup of tea reading your sensitive contracts. It is far more elegant than that. Their systems analyse your email automatically — to serve you better, naturally — which is rather like saying that Benny Hill was just being friendly.

The Price Goes Up. Every Year. Like Clockwork.

In 2019, Google Workspace cost £4.60 per user per month. By 2023 it was £8.28. By 2025, the Business Starter plan — the one that does not include everything you actually need — was £6 per user per month on a locked annual contract. The Business Standard plan, which does include what you need, is £12 per user per month. For a small agency with ten people, that is £1,440 a year for email. Which is fine, until it isn't.

Microsoft 365 is not much better. The pricing is comparable, the contract terms are similar, and instead of one product you are paying for seventeen things — Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange — most of which you will never open, arranged in a dashboard that looks like it was designed by a committee that had never met a human being.

The GDPR Question Nobody Asks Until They Should

Here is a thing that matters, particularly if you are a London creative business working with clients who care about confidentiality. Google is an American company. Microsoft is an American company. Their servers — many of them — are in the United States. And the United States has something called the CLOUD Act, which allows American authorities to compel American companies to hand over data stored anywhere in the world.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a law. It passed in 2018. Nobody made a documentary about it, which is a shame, because John Cleese could have done something magnificent with the scene where a federal subpoena arrives at a data centre in Dublin.

Private Hosting Ltd runs its server in London, England. Your data is subject to UK law and UK GDPR. It does not go anywhere else. There is no CLOUD Act. There is no clever legal argument about where the company is incorporated. It is, quite simply, your email, on a server in London, subject to British law.

Which is not, when you think about it, a very radical proposition. It is just rather rare these days.

The Support Problem (Or: Please Hold, Your Call Is Very Important To Us)

You know how this goes. Something goes wrong with your email. You go to the help centre. You search for your problem. You find a forum thread from 2019 where someone had the same problem, and the answer marked as "helpful" is "have you tried turning it off and on again." You open a ticket. You get an automated response. You get a second automated response telling you that a human will be in touch. The human is in touch four days later, by which time you have either solved it yourself or given up entirely and started using WhatsApp for everything.

Private Hosting Ltd is run by one person — Miguel, who has been looking after business email in London since 2003. When something goes wrong, you call him. He answers. He knows your setup because he set it up. This is not a remarkable service model. It is simply what service used to mean, before it became a ticket number and a satisfaction survey.

The Migration Fear (Unfounded, As It Turns Out)

The single biggest reason businesses stay with Google or Microsoft long after they have stopped being happy with them is the migration. All those years of email. All those contacts. The calendar. The shared folders. Moving it sounds like a project — the kind that requires a consultant, a timeline, and a risk register.

It does not. We have done it hundreds of times. We log in to your existing provider, take a full copy of everything — every email, every folder, every contact, every calendar entry going back to the beginning of time — and migrate it to our server while you carry on working. On switchover night, the DNS changes. By morning, you are live. We are there, in person or remotely, to walk every device through the new settings one by one.

Every single client who has migrated to us has said some version of the same thing afterwards: "that was much smoother than I expected." Not one has gone back.

So Who Is This For, Exactly?

Private Hosting Ltd is not for everyone. If you need SharePoint, Teams, and a unified productivity suite that integrates with your ERP system, Microsoft 365 is probably the right answer and we wish you well.

But if you are a film production company, a PR agency, an architecture practice, a photography studio, or an independent creative professional — if you send confidential contracts, sensitive briefs, unreleased work — if you value the idea that your business correspondence is, in fact, your business — then you might find that private email hosting in London, from a company that has been doing only this since 2003, is exactly what you have been looking for.

As Del Boy would say: lovely jubbly.

Or as Corporal Jones would put it: don't panic. Your email is perfectly safe. It always was. You just did not know it yet.