Get the facts about Business Email Hosting.
Buy Business Email Hosting If you run or own a business, you are probably faced with a wide variety of decisions. You can easily get overwhelmed by making a big decision like the corporate email solution you want to go with. Let’s take a close look at the different email solutions available to you, and see why business email hosting is your best option.
Kinds of Email Solutions
Free Online Email Solutions
There are many different types of email accounts available. Free, online email accounts are easily available to anyone but are usually used by consumers. This is for a couple of reasons – for one thing, they usually have minimal storage. Also, they are advertising-based, and businesses don’t really want to subject their employees to third party advertising. Lastly, the business doesn’t really have much control over the email service – most corporations want to filter, scan, and backup their employee’s email.
Paid Online Email Service
Some paid online email services give you more storage and options, but these are still mainly geared at consumers and don’t offer the flexibility needed by large corporations.
Corporate Online Email Solutions
Google Apps is probably the largest company that offers these corporate type accounts, but that is still based only online. Google hosts the data, but the corporation can have much more control over their user accounts and the settings and options for each one. This is a popular business solution but still does not offer the absolute security and control that many businesses want.
Business Email Hosting
This is by far the most popular email solution and for a variety of good reasons. Purchasing and setting up their own hosting gives business complete control over their employee’s data and allows them to control it that they need. It does not require trusting a third-party service with the data (even though a third party hosting company is used, they do not directly run the software used but leave that up to the individual corporation). Let’s look closer at the features offered by this, and why it is such a popular solution.
Features of Business Email Hosting
You Get the Benefit, and Your Host Does the Work
By purchasing hosting from a third-party provider, you don’t have to worry about maintaining the servers yourself, a task that can be daunting even for a company with a large IT department. Your host will set up, run, and maintain the servers you use to host your email. By going with a company specializing in web hosting, you know that you’re getting a company that knows what they’re doing and that has all the special accommodations needed for running a server, such as enormous amounts of bandwidth and specially built data centers.
Most hosting companies offer a couple of different packages based on how much control you want over your email hosting. You can get a generic web hosting package or dedicated server and then install and run an email application yourself. This leaves you with a lot of work, and your hosting company generally won’t support any third-party applications you install.
A Look at the Email Software
The better option is to go with a hosting package specifically built for email hosting. Your hosting company probably offers a couple of different software solutions. Microsoft Exchange is the most common corporate email solution and the one you more likely want to use. Exchange is a robust server email program that syncs with Microsoft Outlook on the desktop for a complete email experience. It also offers Outlook Web Access (OWA), a browser-based email client so that your employees can access their email anywhere, even without Microsoft Outlook installed. It does not offer as many features as the desktop program and is not a complete replacement for the desktop client.
The other option that many companies offer is some proprietary email solution – an email program that they wrote. This varies by company, so describing an exact feature set is impossible, but contact the company you are looking to find out more about their email hosting options. Though not as popular as Microsoft Exchange, this may be a good option because the hosting company will usually provide better support for their custom program and be better able to help you integrate their program with your business.
General Business Email Hosting Features That You May Like
Many features are common to any custom business email hosting software solution. These features are specifically designed to suit the needs of your business. Here’s a look at common features that you will want.
User Account Management
This is the ability to create custom email addresses for each employee and manage, control, and restrict various aspects of their accounts.
Filtering and Monitoring
This will allow you to make sure that your employees aren’t viewing or sending inappropriate material at work and scan email for any other types of content that you wish to monitor or restrict.
Data Security
Business Email Hosting should allow you to keep track of all your employee’s mail, so you can make sure that it’s safe from hackers and back it all up so that you don’t lose important corporate data.
Whatever your business’s needs are, buying business hosting is a great option for an email solution. It provides you with a variety of great options to help you manage large amounts of data and control many user accounts. Contact your hosting company today to find out what kind of options they offer for business email hosting.