A Comprehensive Guide to Email Hosting for Businesses

Active communication is a major cornerstone for any business. From the initial setting up of the business to growing it further, effectively communicating with existing as well potential customers is an essential task. With the growth of multichannel marketing and communication tools, it has become easier to reach, attract, inform and retain customers. However, the efficacy and simplicity of an email cannot be forgotten amidst the constant SMSs, WhatsApps and Social Media DMs. Emails have been and continue to be the most formal and effective way of communicating with not only your customers and clients, but also the internal stakeholders.

In this article, we will decode Email Hosting, its features and benefits and help establish its relevance as a vital part of your marketing efforts.

To begin with, let’s understand what Email Hosting is. Email Hosting is a service that hosting providers offer, where they rent out email servers to their users. The server handles the complete data for both sending and receiving mails. You will set up an email address, via your company’s domain name (xyz@yourcompanyname.com). Emails then are sent and received on the server, instead of passing through free webmail sites, like Gmail, Yahoo etc.

You simply have to connect the registered domain name to the email servers. This will then be used to generate unique usernames for each employee or user who accesses the server. For instance, employee x will get a unique email address (x@yourcompanyname.com), and the server will host all mails — incoming and outgoing — to that email address.

Free vs Paid Hosting Services

A hosting company will provide different types of email services. The option you choose is completely dependent on your company’s needs. One key choice you must consider is between Free and Paid Email Hosting services.

Free Email Hosting:

We’ve mentioned some of the biggest names in free hosting email services like Gmail and Yahoo, but there are more. Hotmail and AOL are other popular free email hosting services to consider. Free email hosting does come with benefits, such as no commitment or contract and enough file storage to meet the needs of a small business. However, there are some downsides to consider, including:

• Weaker security measures
• Limited customer services or solutions
• Less cloud storage space
• No personalised domain name (which could result in clients/ customers underestimating your business and brand).

Paid/ Professional Email Hosting:

For a growing business, paid or professional Email Hosting is a better fit. Firstly, you get your own personalised domain name (which creates a stronger impression of your brand), you receive more storage space, strong antivirus and spam filters, security measures which are powerful enough to handle network failure or any other threats, no advertisements and more. Furthermore, you gain access to collaboration tools and features like shared calendars, address books, task lists that can be viewed, edited and shared amongst a group of employees. What’s more, you can access your email over multiple devices (smartphone, webmail or even an email client like Outlook).

Types of Email servers

1. POP3: With this kind of Email Hosting, your email is downloaded from the main server and stored on your machine. Therefore, you can read mails offline, but you won’t find some or all emails on the server. This can be confusing, especially when you choose to access your email from different or multiple devices. For instance, if you download an email on your laptop, it won’t be available on your phone.
2. IMAP: Your mail server is synced to the software on your device, so that you can view the email as it is on the server. IMAP offers you a uniform view of your mails, so you can see the same content and folders regardless of where you access the emails from. Since everything is stored on the server, you can save your drafts and send emails on the server in order to recover them from any device. This option also comes with features such as IDLE, folder sharing, subscriptions and sieve filtering.
3. ISP: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer mail servers that are suited for standard personal mail communication. This basic service isn’t for sending bulk emails, as they often limit how many emails you can send. If you’re looking to invest or maximise on email marketing campaigns, choosing ISP hosting can cause some problems. For those who need to send bulk mails, or send a considerable number of emails should look for other options from a web hosting provider or an Email Hosting company.
4. Cloud Email Hosting: If disaster recovery of your emails is a priority, then you need to look at private email cloud providers. This option provides operational efficiency as well as reduced costs. You don’t need dedicated in-house staff to manage internal email servers or any physical equipment. This is also a scalable solution, allowing you to add or reduce resources based on your user count. Moreover, Cloud servers are kept up-to-date, both in terms of security patches and recent technological updates and advancements. Most importantly, Cloud Email Hosting offers great backup options, so even if your system crashes, all your emails and data remain safe.

What are the Benefits of Email Hosting?

You have many choices to make, but finding the right Email Hosting solution does have many benefits for your company.

1. Cost: You don’t need to worry about hiring someone to install mail servers or create teams to run these servers — that in itself saves a lot of your budget.
2. Brand reliability: Businesses with their own domain names are more trusted as their email address features the business domain name.
3. Security: Professional Email Hosting services offer servers that are equipped with industry level encryption. Therefore, it is ensured that the data sent to and from the server stays encrypted no matter where you sign in from. That keeps your sensitive data secure. Passwords and usernames are also well encrypted when they are sent from the client to the server for authentication. Good hosting providers offer advanced antivirus as well as spam protection so that your emails are protected from online threats, junk mails and spam barrages.
4. Storage space: After you’ve signed up, your Email Hosting provider will offer you good storage space. Companies with more flexible Email Hosting plans will provide you with more storage, if you require it, by upgrading your service.
5. Address Book: As your business grows, so will your contacts. The address book is a convenient method to let you store your contacts and recover them easily, should you need to. Both shared, and public address books are provided by most Email Hosting services.

Business Emails are a great option to ensure that you build conversations with your customers, clients and vendors. They also play a vital role internally by connecting team members. If you’re looking for a good Email Hosting provider, make sure that they offer good storage, email synchronisation, a personalised domain name, calendars, a strong support team, strong antivirus, a branded SSL certificate to secure your email, 99.99% uptime and other features to help your business grow and scale.