Outsourced Email Hosting

As critical as email is to most companies, it is important to remember that a company's mail servers are a part of the company's infrastructure, and are not usually directly related to the products or services that the company offers to its customers.

To be successful, it is important for a company to focus as many of its resources as possible on the business itself, and its core competencies. In any business, a portion of the company's financial and human resources are invested in establishing and maintaining the company's underlying infrastructure.

This infrastructure is necessary for doing business but does not directly produce revenue. In essence, the infrastructure is a necessary expense. The bottom line is that if a company can minimize the costs of doing business and maximize the focus of its resources on its core competency, then the company will be more profitable and successful.

As such, it makes sense to examine infrastructure related expenses, and see if they can be reduced through outsourcing. Often times, an outsourcing company can provide a better service than what can be provided in house, but at a lower cost, and with less complexity. This not only reduces costs, but it also frees up staff to focus on the company's business objectives.

Of all of the components that make up a company's infrastructure, perhaps none makes more sense to outsource than the company's email solution. Although the reasons behind this choice are mostly financial, businesses find the ability to shift the responsibility of operations as well as the responsibility of complying with various federal regulations more to their benefit.

Through outsourcing your mailboxes to a Mail Hosting company not only allows you to avoid the initial start-up costs of deploying an Exchange Server organization, the ongoing costs are usually less as well. The reason why this is possible is that Mail Hosting companies typically divide server resources among multiple clients. This means that several companies are sharing the expense of the hardware, software, as well as monitoring and maintenance costs, rather than your company has to cover the entire costs.

Benefits – Outsourced Email Hosting

  • Reliability & Security: Outsourced Email Hosting companies infrastructure include fully redundant and clustered environment. Provides anti-malware, anti-virus, and redundant firewall facility.
  • Disaster recovery: hosting companies are more likely to have significant backups set up on a regular basis, so if disaster strikes data can be restored quickly and efficiently
  • Regulations: regarding the security, management, and retention of email. Complying with these regulations is as tedious as it is expensive, with a hosting company able to do it for you!
  • Web-based Online Interface: Web page provided to check emails from anywhere office, home or when on a business trip. The software built around agreed-upon, standardized protocols for handling email messages and the graphics they might contain. A viable service runs virtually everywhere.

An outsourced email hosting company provides professional email addresses to entrepreneurs, small business owners, and individuals with personal websites. By utilizing the services of such a domain email hosting business, the user can present a professional image to prospective customers or website visitors.

A name@domainname.com address presents a much more positive image than even the most popular free providers or even a well-known internet service provider's name. When an entrepreneur or small business owner makes the decision to establish an online presence, the first step is to select the perfect domain name. The best choice will be reflective of the business, easy for customers to remember, and, hopefully, available for registration.

If a professional image is desired, the new website owner will want to look at the many companies that provide outsourced email hosting and select one that provides needed services at a reasonable price. These companies set up the emailing program so that the website owner has an address that ends with the domain name.

Putting this address on business cards and company letterhead will give an established aura to even the newest business venture and help provide customer confidence. Almost all domain email hosting companies will tout their spam filter capabilities. These businesses recognize how much productivity is wasted when individuals have to sort through offensive and unsolicited inbox messages.

This kind of protection is an important service for the hosting companies to provide to their clientele. When choosing a host, the prudent website owner will take care to read through the marketing and promotional material very carefully and not to take anything for granted.

In-house security – Outsourced Email Hosting

  • Security needs occur at both ends server and client. You need secured devices used by employees to check emails.
  • Office environment must include Firewall at the network level and regularly monitored by professional. Install regular patches to fill loopholes to stop hackers infiltration.

In recent years, mainly due to concerns over spam and a general trend towards centralization, problems have arisen for small organizations and home users wishing to run

their own email server. Problems encountered by small mail-servers include zealous use of blacklisting and a presumption of guilt by blacklisting services and large email providers, which classify “new” servers as spammers by default. Such measures have inevitably reduced the overall number of small email-servers, and some end-users have opted to outsource to paid services instead, exacerbating the problem for those not wishing to outsource. Outsourcing is the process of contracting a business function to someone else. It is sometimes confused with off shoring, though a function may be outsourced without off shoring or vice versa. The opposite of outsourcing is called vertical integration or in-sourcing.

Two organizations may enter into a contractual agreement involving an exchange of services and payments. Outsourcing thereby helps the firms to perform well in their core competencies and thus mitigating rise of skill or expertise shortage in the areas where they want to outsource. Of recent concern is the ability of businesses to outsource to suppliers outside the nation, sometimes referred to as off shoring or offshore outsourcing.

One of the biggest changes of recent years has come from the growth of groups of people using online technologies to use outsourcing as a way to build a viable service delivery business that can be run from virtually anywhere in the world. The preferential contract rates that can be obtained by temporarily employing experts in specific areas to deliver elements of a project purely online means that there is a growing number of small businesses that operate entirely online using offshore outsourced contractors to deliver the work before repackaging it to deliver to the client. One common area where this business model thrives is in provided website creating, analysis and marketing services. All elements can be done remotely and delivered digitally and service providers can leverage the scale and economy of outsourcing to deliver high value services at vastly reduced end customer prices.

A mail server is a computer that serves as an electronic post office for email. Mail exchanged across networks is passed between mail servers that run specially designed software. This software is built around agreed-upon, standardized protocols for handling mail messages and the graphics they might contain.

Using an outsourced email provider means you can check email via a web page. The advantage of this system is that you can check the email from any computer with internet access. This is important for employees who may need to check business email from home or while on business trips. In the changing face of business, there is a lot more telecommuting workers than ever before, which further necessitates web-based email.

There are certain issues to consider when using an outsourced email provider. The email provider will set up redundant firewalls and virus protection to keep the email data secure. However, you should not assume that they have taken care of all your security needs. Security needs to occur from both ends–including the home computers of employees who are checking email remotely.

It is important for the office network to also use redundant firewalls so a hacker cannot gain access to the online email account. It is a good idea to have the network set up by a professional network designer. This will entail a hacker trying to infiltrate the network to see if there are any holes in the system. Network maintenance is key to patch up security breaches.