I've owned my zpyder domain for probably close to two decades, and since then have added other domains.

It's all currently hosted on shared hosting on Hostgator. They've been great in terms of uptime, value for money etc. The only downsides now are that the sites are very slow to load, which is a bummer when they're essentially about photography, and that I've got a bunch of semi-active email addresses I barely use but occasionally something important comes through.

Flickr recently got bought by SmugMug. And it's got me thinking that I might stop paying for my flickr pro account, and make one good photography site on smugmug. If I do this, I don't also want to be spening the $18 a month on my hostgator account (there's no point really is there?)

But I also do not want to lose my emails. So the question is, what do you guys recommend, in terms of a process/service for shutting down my hostgator sites and migrating multiple email addresses/domains to something cheaper? There must be a few products out there that are simply email hosting and no websites?

If you don't want to keep hosting the sites and want to shut them down I'd simply migrate all your email to Gmail along with switching to SmugMug, just do each site in turn, Gmail will allow you to import your whole mailbox, no problem.

If you do want to keep the hosting and domains, I'd probably move it all to 1&1, who actually are very reliable and fast and make managing multiple sites very easy. In terms of shared hosting, they are the ones I've had the best experience with and VFM. If you don't want to pay for many domains and the sites aren't for google indexing/search rank, you could set them up under subdomains like nature.zpyder.co.uk