Email Hosting – Is On or Offsite Better?

In the modern business world the Internet has long since become the most acceptable method of conducting business and communicating with other business and with customers. Through the use of email it is now more possible than ever before to stay in touch with business partners and customers all over the globe in a fraction of the time it used to take and at a much smaller cost. With this in mind it would be in the best interests of most businesses to consider email hosting rather than relying on a third party to handle their email needs.

On Site Email Hosting

If you want to handle the task of email hosting on site you are going to have purchase additional hardware that is designed to handle the load that the email will put on your system along with the necessary software to take care of your email. You will also need to hire the personnel needed to maintain your hosting servers including taking care of the email information, keeping the hardware running and updated and running various types of software including firewalls and antivirus programs.

While this may not seem like much, in most cases it will take more than one highly trained and skilled technician especially for a larger company that deals with thousands of emails per day. Adding to your IT staff is a very expensive proposition and when you add in the extra burden running you own email hosting server can put on your system, it may not be the most cost efficient way to handle your email load.

Going Outside the Box

Using an offsite email hosting company makes the most sense for all but the very biggest corporations and most of them also choose to go offsite. When you choose to go with an offsite hosting service you pay a monthly fee and leave everything to your hosting company. In essence this means that you are renting the email servers along with the services of their IT staff. The hosting companies will not only supply you with your own email server, but in most cases also provide you with a level of redundancy by providing back up storage and servers in cases there are problems.

For a set price you will have the ability to create an unlimited number of email accounts that can range from a few to hundreds to cover all of your employees and departments. Because all of the emails are stored on the hosting server anyone with access to the system can retrieve them reducing the risk of them being lost, on top of which the hosting company also maintains at least one backup copy on a separate server. This also makes sure that if there is a hardware failure of any kind your email does not get lost.

The bottom line is that using an offsite email hosting service makes far more sense both from a usability point of view and financially. With an offsite host all of the email accounts can be accessed from anywhere in the world and for your monthly fee you can determine the size of your hosting server. You never have to worry about equipment or the personnel to maintain it, further reducing your overhead. There are plenty of companies that offer email hosting services and they can help match your email address to your domain name so that all of your email looks as professional as possible.