Email Hosting: Five Reasons to Make the Switch

Email is an invaluable tool in today’s business; one you use to connect with your employees, customers, prospects, partners, and vendors on a daily basis. And though it is integral to your success, maintaining your email technology has become an administrative, time-intensive task that pulls you away from other business critical technology projects that could help your organization move forward more quickly in the marketplace. This is where opting for a hosted email solution can help.

What Exactly Is Email Hosting?

Simply put, email hosting is a service which runs on servers that are hosted in someone else’s environment, accessible to you via the Internet. Offered in various platforms including Exchange and Lotus Notes, these services typically include email server deployment, hosting, migration, on-going email management, and allow you to access the service via SMTP, POP3 and IMAP protocols. Reputable hosting providers also deploy strong security measures, making it virtually impossible for anyone to read your company's email or steal your users’ passwords, and offer more advanced functionality including archiving and mobile messaging.

Why Many Businesses Have Already Made Email Hosting a Must

Reduced Total Cost of Ownership

For most of companies, initial setup and on-going operational costs are a key concern. With email hosting, they can harness the advantage of minimal up-front cost and ensures reduction in total cost of ownership. There are no hidden costs, or the expense of a full time IT staff! Their capital expenditure of purchasing hardware, software, IT infrastructure, resources, and even real estate and cooling costs are replaced with one simple monthly hosting fee. The result most times is a direct reduction in their operational costs.

Predictable Expense Management

When you know your monthly cost in advance, saving costs is more tangible and predictable. You can easily budget the monthly fee for long in advance as you pay only for services that you use, not for setting them up. Email plans are available in varying sizes of 1GB, 2GB, 5GB, or 10GB of storage, per mailbox which allows you to choose from various safe and reliable, low-cost plans.

Improved Availability and Performance

The complexity of managing email availability and performance is compounded by the extensive IT infrastructure and higher downtime, which is why industry-leading providers offer email hosting plans that include uptime guarantees. With these services, your emails are typically processed through secure and reliable load-balanced servers placed in state-of-the-art data centers to enhance the email system’s performance. And should something unexpected occur, the provider can quickly respond and recover your data. The email hosting provider also employs anti-SPAM and anti-virus measures to secure your mail from phishing and other malicious threats. Moreover, leading email hosting providers constantly upgrade their messaging infrastructure and include Service Level Guarantees to ensure that you get the most reliable email hosting service possible.  

Flexibility to Meet Changing Needs

Based on your changing needs of storage, domain names or servers, email hosting providers allow you to quickly add the specific features so that your users’ needs can be met - anytime, anywhere. All it takes is a call to your provider and the changes required can typically be made within few hours.

Improved Business Alignment

Email hosting is a proven and tested method for aligning IT capabilities closely with actual business goals. Not only can the service be customized to meet your basic email needs, but some find that they are able to take advantage of advanced messaging functionality, such as archiving and mobile messaging, that they never would have had the ability to deploy and use on their own.