The Definitive Guide To Email Hosting

Emails are central to corporate correspondence, and play a significant role in any online business. Business owners might be using emails on daily basis to have vital conversations with clients. It is imperative for this conversation to remain safe as you continue to have many business dealings through email.

Many businesses presently use free email services like Yahoo!, Gmail, Rediffmail, and so forth. It is normal to wonder if they are safe enough to secure confidential information around business. As a business, do you use a free email service? This is important to establish as many email users forgo paid hosting, opting for free email hosting instead. An entrepreneur shares several important documents – bills, invoices, client, contacts, and other pieces of information – via email. Whatever information you share using them actually remains with them. Imagine the implications of that| you cannot afford to lose clients or subscribers because of a generic email like your.company@gmail.com that you use for business, instead of your own domain like info@yourbusiness.com.

It is fairly common for businesses to encounter email-related cases that impact business considerably. Some include password stealing, email hacking, or not recalling a password. Anyone can experience these scenarios, especially with a free email service. Free email services leave very little within your realm of control. The solution is thus to always opt for an email hosting service.

So, what is Email Hosting?

Email hosting is a service that hosts email on a server. The server is either bought or rented from the email host. The server handles all of your data for sending and receiving email. This is a different situation as you find with Gmail, Yahoo!, and their ilk.

This service offers a unique property of renting out a server for the sole purpose of hosting emails. Businesses use this method to set up email addresses via a domain name. Because emails are sent straight from the server, rather than through free webmail providers, the service is unique.

Clients only need to connect their registered domain name to their email servers. To generate unique usernames for each email user accessing the said server, this combination is used. To illustrate, a company employee will have a unique email address as BobAlice@companydomain.com. The server will host all incoming and outgoing emails to this email address.

Server is the other unique property of email hosting. Free webmail services cater to numerous users at once but email hosting runs off a dedicated server. The implication is that is available for only a particular number of email accounts. That said, where the client requirement surpasses the capacity of their current server, it is possible to scale up and share the content across multiple servers.

Email hosting is reliable and efficient [to the extent the web host is reliable and efficient]. It is common to find web hosting companies offering an email hosting service. Such email hosting services are equipped with POP3 email and basic spam/virus protection in addition to other wide-ranging features. Some of these are found on free email hosting with advertising support. A small business would be wise not to use these for business email, due to the inadequacy of the services when compared with professional email hosting.

Types of mail servers

POP3 email hosting

POP3 email hosting downloads the email from the mail server and stores it on your machine. You are able to read your emails offline but some emails downloaded (sometimes all) will not be available on the server. This can be confusing as, if you download email on some device (say phone) or send from it, you may not be able to view it on your laptop.

IMAP email hosting

IMAP email hosting syncs the mail server to software on your machine, so you can see the email as it sits on your server. Your view of your email is synchronised across devices so the same email and folders are available wherever you access your email account.

In addition, since everything is stored on the server, you can store draft and sent emails on the server with IMAP, and recover them from any client device. IMAP also offers features such as IDLE, subscriptions, seive filtering, and folder sharing.

ISP hosting

Internet service providers (ISPs) offer mail servers that work for standard personal email communication. This can be used to send bulk emails, though there is a limit on the number of emails one can send via ISP servers. To send bulk emails, opt for email hosting from a reputable web hosting provider that care about your positioning and ranking online or an independent email hosting company. There are various hosting providers that excel at this, including Siteground, GreenGeek, www.discountdomains.co.nz/web-hosting, and Freeparking.nz.

Cloud email hosting

A small company with a limited budget does not possess the disaster recovery infrastructure pipeline of Google, Facebook, or Microsoft. Anyone serious about disaster recovery for email will consider private email cloud providers.

They are similar to other cloud-based services, offering operational efficiency and lower costs. You save money on hiring IT staff to manage internal email servers or physical server equipment for maintenance. High scalability is something cloud hosting offers. You scale up or scale down resources based on user count, ensuring your costs are minimised.

Email cloud servers come with the latest security patches and up-to-the-minute technological advancements. They offer benefits as lower costs, lower firewall requirements, and increased bandwidth requirements in relation to other services. As icing on the cake, email is placed on the internet and remains safe even if the unthinkable happens and system crashes.

Types of email services available

Hosting companies offer several types of email services, the value of each depending on client needs. Email filtering is one such service. This reduces spam, while protecting inbox from viruses. Restrictions vary by company, thus incoming email is filtered through some rules that tag or divert unsolicited or malicious email as those are sent to the client account.

Basic email hosting

In this email hosting, one can use POP3 and IMAP hosting along with an email client like Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook. There is also webmail provided from a browser, at a specific address, say webmail.yourdomain.com.

Email filtering relay

As a useful tool to fight spam, you use this to filter spam email on your own in-house mail server, while outsourcing spam and virus opposing to the cloud. It accepts email for you and before sending any emails to your in-house server, it is filtered for spam and other unwanted email.

Email-based collaboration services

Here, email is enhanced with other collaboration software. Shareable features including calendars, task lists, and address books, can be viewed and edited among a group of people. Businesses relying on heavy online collaboration can reap the benefits of such services.

Benefits of Email Hosting

Cost – Professionals save you much less than they cost you to hire. Installing mail servers and maintenance of technical teams to run them is no longer an expense. Businesses also improve their reputation with email hosting as their email address contains their business domain name.

Disk space – On sign up, email hosts offer adequate storage space to clients. It might be in MB or GB per mailbox. With flexible email hosting plans, clients get more space where they need it by upgrading.

Spam protection – An email account remains safe from malware and spam due to the spam filtering email hosting solutions provide. With filtering methods like blacklisting and whitelisting, users can define configurations to automatically send spam to quarantine folders instead of the inbox.

Security – Mail servers from professional email hosts come with bleeding-edge encryption. Thus, data sent to and from the server stays encrypted at sign-in or log-out. Thus sensitive data is not intercepted or compromised. Email hosting solutions guarantee secure access via POP and IMAP. Usernames and passwords are properly encrypted when sent for authentication,  to servers from clients.

Mail clients like Thunderbird, Outlook, and Apple Mail are supported by reputable providers. Linux clients and pocket PCs and PDAs are supported by some providers. Efficiency and safety should be hallmarks of email hosting solutions.

Address book – This makes it easy for users to store contacts and recover them easily. Public and shared address books offering access to the public network directories are provided by many email hosting providers.

Conclusion

Email is important for businesses to carry on important conversations with clients. The vital role of email in communication between teams, team members, customers, and vendors cannot be over-emphasised. A business that is majorly dependent on email and looking for reliable email services without in-house server costs and technical hassle should consider email hosting.

The demand for high quality email hosting support is great because these services remove the extra costs of hiring people to manage in-house email servers.