I would switch to Fastmail in a heartbeat if they let me pay for storage (say in 5 gig intervals) and let me mount as many domains and create as many inbox as I want. Other than that, I see no point in paying for email. Sorry. I'm a snob.
Technical merits aside, by using a small but well run non-gmail provider for a mere £25 pa I get (i) near instantaneous tech support in my time zone, from people who know more about email & admin than I do. They even have a phone number. (ii) out of the monoculture, thus vastly diminished risk from various canned account theft problems
The same goes for the author. I don't get how gmail is even considered as a mail provider for more than a spam oder mandatory account. The list of better and serious mail providers is tremendous.
For my family and me, I am hosting a small exchange server, with a synchronous replica in a datacenter, at home. It's safe, has nearly unlimited disk space and I know where my backups are.
Personally, I just use a free smarthost, but that loses some of the privacy advantages.
For myself I am going with a major commercial antispam solution, which is hosted in two of our datacenters. Since I am working with the developers and admins on regular basis there's no reason not to trust them.