So last Thursday morning the current hosting company sent an email saying they were shutting down all their own servers Sept 29, and would be offering AWS hosting going forward, thus it turned out my concerns were justified. My GoDaddy experience has been mixed, the VPS host itself is fine, but the email/SMTP issues are not good.
Today I got an email from GoDaddy support regarding one of several emails I had asked for review of due to being spam filter blocked from sending/forwarding. "As I understand it, you are receiving a bounce back error “552: Message rejected for spam or virus content”. At this time, we have been unable to troubleshoot this issue and will need you to provide the original email that caused the bounce back." They cited a tracking number in their email subject line.
However, no direct links nor did they provide the original email subject line from the submitted message and in fact told me to follow steps that were not possible - my bounces just had a warning string in the bodies "You will want to access your sent items and find the message that has the matching subject and recipient that is given in the bounce, then save that message as an .EML or .MSG. file. Once gathered, we ask that you resubmit this message using the link that you clicked in the bounce back message so your bounce information remains intact.".
One of the two emails from the GoDaddy recipients list bounced when I sent a reply, the other sent an auto responder saying emailing support is not possible. "After careful consideration we have decided to no longer offer general support via email. We want our customers to reach out to our other support teams which are quickly expanding to meet our customers' needs."
So I tried chat, where I was stuck for several hours, and being asked to provide the email address I was sent correspondence from, and finding out email addresses are filtered out of chat, the rep kept asking if I could supply the address, I would paste it and they would ask again! Anyway, support kept asking me to stay on chat, and they were relaying all my info to the "back end folks" and it might take a few hours to get back to me. After 2 hours had rolled by, I said it seems to me there were issues with their email support for those who are self hosting and that it seems their relay was not suited for regular correspondence email relay and that I would be pursuing other options. They then started saying I needed to be patient and the back end folks would get back with me. It's really sad that the form letter email I was sent included no link to resubmit nor provide the subject line of the email they were researching, as subject line is a field on https://checkspam.godaddy.com/ and that support cannot actually look anything up with this tracking number with any kind of efficiency.
I'm kinda dismayed at overall email centered support - the first couple of days I had the container, and I was having issues with simple test emails being rejected by the relay as spam - I kept getting passed from person to person one wanting my plesk or cpanel URL (which I do not use) another sending me to outlook 365 - despite stating I was having issues with the VPS ded relay for self hosted email (and this is one of the 6 reasons they cite as why one might choose a VPS "Set up and fully control your own email server. Run unlimited mailboxes and addresses for your business or clients.") - I did finally get someone to help, but not before she just updated my DNS entries without consent. Apparently they needed some MORE SPF entries - two more - one for admin, the other mail, then the email went through, not sure how I feel about the editing without communicating first, and these were not documented in their GoDaddy SPF docs.
So now I've followed up with my old standby hosting company, outlined concerns backups with a windows host on AWS and issues I ran into while exploring AWS on my own regarding email self hosting, which they say they can make happen, so I asked for a quote on for services on their new AWS platform. We'll see what happens.
Note 9/2: - I had submitted 4-5 messages for research, and never got but this one reply, and never had further followup on the email that I did TRY to correspond about.