How To Choose an Email Hosting Provider

Email hostingChoosing an Email hosting provider could be the easiest among the many hosting concerns of a small or a large corporation. You can just think about Web hosting companies that also provide email services in their Web hosting plans.

However: What are the characteristics of an email hosting service that can give you a lot of convenience, data security or privacy and reliability? There are many email hosting providers that offer the same email hosting services, and it’s mostly up to you to decide on which provider would give your company the right balance of all these things you need for your email hosting needs.

The first thing that you would have to check belongs to the pre-selling aspect of it all: The sign up process. Most site owners like to sign up for an email hosting account with providers that make the process shorter and faster than usual. This would allow them to make the company email available to the rest of their workforce so as not to stall important email exchanges. You should also check if there is any lock-in period required by the provider. Not having to be locked up with a service provider gives you flexibility. It’s good to note as well that because of the existence of many competitors, some providers offer a full money-back-guarantee if the customer is not happy of the service, as long as it’s cancelled within 30 days.

The second aspect that you should consider is user-friendliness. It wouldn’t help even if the Web hosting provider offers a fast sign-up process when you and your associates could have difficulties configuring your email accounts to make it work. As often said, there is more use to something that is simple and easy to understand. Also, the user-friendliness of a company email extends to its ability of supporting widely used email clients, such as Outlook and Web mail access using Web browsers like Internet Explorer. In addition, the recent developments in the mobile industry increased the demand for email hosting providers to extend the accessibility of their email hosting services to iPhones, Android devices and the like. This demand, as an effect, also improved email hosting services and its ability to synchronize calendar settings, mailbox, contacts and scheduled tasks of the users across many devices.

Next to consider is the limitations set by the provider, whether it’s a plan default or upon your request. These limitations usually fall into two major categories:

• How many users can register for an email account; and
• How much email data storage space is given per user?

You should check these things with your email hosting provider to make sure that everyone in your company would be able to quickly and easily communicate via email. As per the limit on space, some hosts also use the throttling method per user. With this, a certain user can store both inbound and outbound emails of a certain accumulated size. Some companies would find this very beneficial, especially if it’s done on a per user basis. For example, if one user is expected to be constantly sending and receiving emails with file attachments, then the company may choose to allocate more email space for that person. However, if the user is not expected to be highly dependent on email communications, then he or she can get a minimum allocation. This is to avoid abuse and unnecessary traffic load.

Another characteristic that you should check is the security implemented into the email hosting services offered by the Web hosting provider. The security of information transmitted from one user to another must be closely monitored.

Having your office network system hacked because of a virus attached to an inbound email will cause more problems. Although most email hosting providers now integrate anti-virus and anti-spam software into their email hosting services, you should still verify the inclusion of these data security and privacy features. You wouldn’t want to be forced to buy anti-virus software licenses from a third party developer just to monitor your email hosting service.

While most Web hosting providers include email hosting services in their Web hosting plans, this should not be a reason to compromise the quality of the email hosting services you get. While the need for a large server dedicated to email hosting would be rare, it must be a guaranteed robust server so as to accommodate data for efficient email communications. Also, the bandwidth included in your email hosting service plan must be enough to deliver emails on a timely basis, especially since urgent email correspondences are crucial in the growth and expansion of a business. In addition, a reliable email hosting provider must back up their servers on a regular basis. Hosted company email services come with a lot of features, depending on the provider and the plan that you will subscribe to. Of course, the more features they have on a plan, the more expensive it becomes. Some of the features that a company may not want to overlook include:

● Webmail - This feature allows the employee or the user to access his or her company email as long as there is an existing Internet connection. This provides convenience to all email account users. If someone is on a location far from the company headquarters, they can easily be updated if there is access to his or her inbox from the Web.

● Mail Management - In a corporate environment, one user may receive emails from several colleagues with varying importance. With a feature such as mail management, a user can organize his or her emails in a manner that would provide convenience in sorting out those emails.

● RSS Feeds - This feature can also be integrated into email hosting plans. This feature automatically sends updates from sites that the email account user can configure.

● Multi Language Support - An email hosting provider offering this feature will be beneficial to your daily email communication needs. It is of course unwise to leave a foreign language speaker incapable of using your email accounts or conversing with you and your associates via email because of this barrier. A user may also have important deals that are processed through email, and not being able to have his or her own email account may lose the company some business.

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