According to Live Direct Marketing's daily Tranco top-1M scan (July 13, 2026), Self-Hosted is the mailbox provider for 147,798 domains — 22.44% of 658,711 domains with MX records. Detection method: primary MX record (lowest preference).
Self-Hosted refers to organisations that operate their own email infrastructure rather than using a third-party mailbox provider. There is no single operator; instead, each self-hosted mail server is independently run by its owner.
The footprint pattern shows self-hosting concentrated in smaller, regionally specific, and niche sites rather than at consumer or enterprise scale. For anyone sending to these addresses, this distribution means encountering highly variable reputation scores, filtering policies, and infrastructure maintenance standards across distinct mail servers.
| Tranco rank band | Domains | Share of its base |
|---|---|---|
| Top 1,000 | 82 | 0.1% |
| Top 10,000 | 932 | 0.6% |
| Top 100,000 | 11,464 | 7.8% |
| Top 1,000,000 | 108,173 | 73.2% |
| Unranked | 27,147 | 18.4% |
| TLD | Domains | Share | |
|---|---|---|---|
| .com | 53,430 | 36.2% | |
| .net | 11,167 | 7.6% | |
| .ru | 10,761 | 7.3% | |
| .de | 4,716 | 3.2% | |
| .org | 4,506 | 3.0% | |
| .jp | 2,805 | 1.9% | |
| .pl | 2,741 | 1.9% | |
| .com.br | 2,587 | 1.8% | |
| .it | 2,494 | 1.7% | |
| .ir | 1,827 | 1.2% |
Cross-tabulated from the same daily snapshot — the other email services seen on the same 147,798 domains.
| Type | Service | Domains | Share of Self-Hosted users |
|---|---|---|---|
| ESP | MailChannels | 2,770 | 1.9% |
| ESP | Amazon SES | 2,730 | 1.8% |
| ESP | Mailgun | 1,559 | 1.1% |
| ESP | SendGrid (Twilio) | 1,448 | 1.0% |
| ESP | Mailchimp | 1,375 | 0.9% |
| ESP | Mailjet (Sinch) | 1,231 | 0.8% |
| ESP | MailerSend | 1,219 | 0.8% |
| ESP | Mandrill | 1,164 | 0.8% |
| ESP | Brevo (ex-Sendinblue) | 968 | 0.7% |
| ESP | Unisender (RU) | 963 | 0.7% |
Each self-hosted mail server operates independently, which creates significant variability in how it evaluates sender reputation and applies filtering rules. Unlike centralised providers, which maintain unified threat detection and abuse-handling policies, self-hosted systems may run different software stacks, apply custom rules, or lack resources for frequent security updates. This means a sender's deliverability to one self-hosted domain cannot reliably predict outcomes at another, even when both are configured correctly for SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
See the full Self-Hosted data page (KPI cards, trend, sample domains) →
Self-Hosted refers to mail servers run directly by the organisation or individual who owns the domain, rather than by a third-party email provider. This matters for deliverability because each self-hosted server has its own reputation profile, filtering rules, and maintenance practices, so delivery outcomes can vary significantly between them.
147,798 domains in the Tranco top-1M use Self-Hosted as their mailbox provider as of July 13, 2026 (22.44% of domains with MX records), according to Live Direct Marketing's daily DNS scan.
Self-Hosted accounts for 22.44% of domains with MX records in the top 1M. Whether you should seed a test mailbox there depends on how much of your audience it represents — the co-usage table above shows the services it appears alongside most.
Self-Hosted is declining — its share moved -0.40 pp over the last 30 days (as of July 13, 2026).
Self-Hosted's largest TLD is .com (36.2% of its domains); it appears across 644 TLDs in total.