Why SMEs Must Consider Going With Dedicated Email Services

Most businesses consider emails as the most effective tool for marketing their products and services. Online banks, e-commerce stores, user verifications, and paid adverts require valid email addresses for a smooth functioning business. Executives in the digital industry know that a few minutes of delay in sending an email can create panic in their customers’ minds.

Similarly, small and entry-level enterprises need to leverage the internet’s power to grow their customer base. Maintaining and supporting the email themselves consistently or relying on on-premise services adds to the expenses and raises email security issues for an SME. It can also cause various software and hardware issues, which may cause email breakdown for hours or days. Hence, it makes sense for SMEs to opt for email hosting services.

What is Email Hosting and Why Use It?

An email hosting service runs on a dedicated email server. Businesses can sign up for the email hosting service to get an email hosting server. All they need is a domain name, and they can use the dedicated server to send, manage, and maintain their email accounts. Large digital businesses use in-house servers to ensure email deliverability. However, since such solutions require high investments, SMEs go for email hosting solutions. Many website hosting services provide email hosting servers today to add to their regular cloud, shared, or dedicated hosting services.

Types of Email Hosting for SMEs

Various types of email hosting solutions serve different purposes. SMEs can choose from the following variety of dedicated email services depending on their needs.

1. Email service with Shared Web Hosting****: It is a type of email service available with shared hosting. Businesses cannot use it to send or receive bulk emails because of the email server limitations.
2. Third-Party Email Hosting****: It is a preferred choice for most businesses because it is scalable and easy-to-use. They offer excellent support, but organizations need to pay additional charges for it.
3. Self-Hosted Email Servers****: They are robust email servers, but due to their complexity, they require technical expertise to operate efficiently.

Advantages Of A Dedicated Email Hosting Service

Generally, organizations must not host emails on the same server hosting web files and databases of the business websites. However, most SMEs make the mistake of hosting their emails on the same server because they tend to avoid the additional business expense. Therefore, whenever there is a disaster and the server goes down, they are left with little recovery options because the email system also goes offline.

Hosting the email and web applications on the same server is a bad idea from a technical perspective because they need different resources to operate efficiently. Shared hosting leads to competition over the resources, which further drags down the application performance. Furthermore, there are many advantages to choosing a dedicated email service.

• Easy Setup and Management****: Organizations can easily set up and manage several email accounts.
• Support****: Dedicated email service providers offer 24/7 support via email, phone, and online chat.
• Cloud****: The emails will be stored in the cloud, and employees can access them anywhere because they can be synchronized across multiple devices. Furthermore, email hosting services offer quick and easy tenant to tenant migration to avoid downtime when making the switch.
• Collaboration****: Most email hosting service providers offer businesses additional tools to boost collaboration among teams. It includes video call capabilities, shared calendars, documents, email archiving, and email forwarding services.
• Reliability****: The reliable cloud servers guarantee up to 99.9% uptime to ensure maximum availability. It means that in case of a server failure, the business doesn’t get affected.
• Security****: Dedicated email services offer organizations the capability to back up their emails. Additionally, they also offer robust phishing protection and ransomware protection.

Choosing The Best Service For Your Business

Ease-of-setup and use, enhanced collaboration abilities, and reliability make hosted solutions a competitive and viable option for SMEs. Here are a few steps to choose the best service:

1. Know Your Users and Costs****: Cost is the critical driver for SMEs looking to switch to dedicated email service. On average, it is cheaper considering the per-user cost when they factor in the server hardware cost, the add-on security products, and the trained and experienced staff to manage them.
2. Map The Changes In Email Usage Patterns****: Organizations must investigate how their users are using emails daily, along with the specialized uses. The email has evolved over the past 40 years, and so has its usage patterns. It is crucial to map these patterns because they will influence the choice of features and tools required in a dedicated email host.
3. Configuration and Compatibility****: The cloud ensures quick email delivery, but most SMEs will need additional technical controls to activate the service. For example, they will need to purchase and configure a domain to point to the dedicated email host.
4. Security and Privacy****: Email security starts with spam, also called unsolicited email. It can be a daunting task for IT administrators to detect and remove spam from the employees’ inboxes. Dedicated email service providers deploy robust anti-phishing services to protect against spear-phishing and other attacks. Moreover, controls like inbound and outbound SMTP add a layer of security to the email server.

Final Words

Running on-premise email servers provides broader customization, tracking and compliance, and more control to SMEs. But, they need well-trained on-site IT staff to manage and troubleshoot the hardware and software manually. A dedicated email hosting service offers the most advantages of in-house emails, excluding the expensive initial investment. Thus, they are a perfect fit for SMEs.