What is Email Hosting?

We often hear about web hosting as a way to get your business online and out into the world. Granted, this is an essential step, but it leaves an important question unanswered: how will you manage your business communications?

There are many free options out there, and they’re great for private use. But when it comes to business email, there’s only one solution: email hosting.

Email hosting is easy to set up. It’s usually an optional service that comes with your website, and you can activate it when you create your site or later. Alternatively, you can use separate providers for web and email hosting, which is also common.

Many of our trusted, free email hosting providers have their own premium plans giving you a custom domain name and professional features. But it’s worth noting that many third-party and trusted email hosting services are in the wild.

 

Web Hosting?

Web hosting services allow email users to rent computer resources such as memory, bandwidth, and server space needed to host website files on the internet. Hosting enables your website to exist.

Web hosting users can store and create content for their website on a server-rendered via a web browser at an address (domain name).

What’s the Difference Between Web Hosting and Email Hosting?

All these plans and hosting types might sound confusing, especially when you’re trying to focus on your small business growth, but luckily, we have the time to explain it all. The two most popular hosting types are web hosting and email hosting.

• Web Hosting: Think of web hosting as what enables your website to exist and be discoverable on the internet. This service stores your website and is responsible for maintaining its connection to the internet. Your web hosting service might also include an option to activate email hosting, but you need to tell your provider that you want to do that.

• Email Hosting: While it’s usually included with a web hosting plan, email hosting is a separate service that allows you to set up a custom email address and use it to send and receive emails. The email account name will match your website, for instance, name@yourbusiness.com. Separate email hosting is what some might refer to as “professional email” because of the extra features it provides. Apart from the personalized domain name, you may get additional storage space, faster email servers, advanced spam filters, and mail rules, to name a few.

The Benefits of Email Hosting

We’ve already partly touched on some of the features email hosting provides. However, we want to cover this topic in full. Here are a few additional benefits to consider.

This step is very important for everyone who wants to provide the business authenticity and build trust with their customers by having an email address for the same domain as their brand/website.

Also, once you have a personalized email, you should think about creating a business email signature.

Nowadays, malicious attempts by hackers to breach data security are no longer something rare. Unfortunately, such cases increased drastically over the past decade.

We advise you to seek out a provider with multiple ways to increase the security of your data, including 2FA, email encryption, and outstanding spam protection.

These options are typically only available if you pay for your email provider.

Business email service providers offer different options for any need, from small start-ups to large companies. These can include dedicated customer support, collaboration tools, increased storage capacity, or simply adding more addresses to your domain.

If you are planning to expand your business, most paid email hosting plans will provide you with space for growth.

If you are planning an expansion of your business, you should also consider choosing a provider that makes the transfer process easy.

Uptime can be a game changer when it comes to your email service. Some companies prefer not to include these details on their product pages, however, do not hesitate to contact their Customer Support Service and ask this question.  For example, we are proud to provide no ower than 99.9% for all of our Private Email plans. This means that we’ll always keep your emails safe and receive all the emails sent to you.

Usually, email hosting providers include collaboration software to increase the efficiency of the service they provide. These can make life much easier for small businesses by giving them tools to aid their productivity.

• Advanced spam and virus protection.

Another benefit of web hosting email over professional email is robust anti-spam protection. With more advanced phishing and scamming techniques, you need to secure your inbox with more advanced tools.  Professional email services have better anti-spam protection that will help prevent malicious emails from reaching users’ inboxes and reduce the risk of security breaches and malware infections.

How to choose the right provider

If you’ve made it so far, then you’re probably convinced: maybe you do need an email hosting solution. So let’s go over a few factors to consider, to help you choose the right one for you:

• Size of your organization: the first thing to consider is the size of your organization, which will affect the number of email accounts you’ll need. Some email hosting providers offer plans that are tailored to small businesses, while others are designed for larger organizations.
• Email usage needs: then consider the number of emails you send and receive each day, and the type of email features you need. This will determine the amount of storage space you require.
• Reliability and uptime: it’s important that you’re able to access your email whenever you need them. So look for a provider that offers reliable service and high uptime guarantees.
• Security: make sure that the provider you choose has robust security features in place to protect your data and prevent unauthorized access.
• Customer support: look for a provider that offers reliable and responsive customer support. This will ensure that you can quickly resolve any issues that may arise.
• Budget: lastly, there’s – of course – budget. Email hosting plans can vary greatly in cost, so it’s important to choose a provider that fits within your budget.