Business Email Hosting: Should Small Businesses Consider A Custom Email?

Email Hosting March 2nd 2022

You may be using the best web hosting for your business website. But having a professional email for your small business has its own set of benefits. Read on to know the significance of business email hosting for small businesses. 

Your email address is not just a way to connect with your clients or potential buyers but an identity for your business as well. Promoting your brand using free email services like Gmail and Yahoo may seem vague. But business email hosting raises brand recall and builds trust with the receiver. 

Let’s say, you receive an offer email from [email protected] and another offer from [email protected]. You will prefer opening the email you got from Hosting Seekers over the email from Gmail.

In marketing terms, we refer to this as brand recall – this is one of the many benefits of business email hosting. In this blog, we will decode email server hosting, its benefits, and choose the best email hosting for small businesses.

So, let’s get started.

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What Is Email Hosting?

Simply put, email server hosting is a service that allows you to send, receive and store all your emails on a server. Your service provider offers you an email server management to store your emails. With business email hosting comes several other functionalities that may include file transfers, template usage, and folder creation.

Unlike free email service providers like Gmail and Yahoo, you can set up a professional email with email server hosting that includes your domain name. For instance, if your domain is fabercastel.com, you can create a professional email as [email protected].

Having said that, business email hosting gives your small business a strong brand identity, and brand recall.

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Learn About the Truth Behind Free Website Hosting

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How Does Web Hosting Differ From Email Server Hosting? 

Often people get confused between web hosting and email server hosting. Here we have decoded both the services.  

What is Web Hosting? 

Web hosting is a service wherein the hosting provider provides you with a server to store your website (web pages) on it. Besides server space, you also get access to numerous resources like CPU, keyboard, bandwidth, memory, and more. You can store your website on the server to make it accessible on the internet. 

Imagine your website and all its content (text, images, videos, etc.) as a retail store. Then, the webserver is like a physical space to exhibit all its products and some additional resources to run and manage it.

Different types of web hosting are available to choose from based on your website needs. Email server hosting is a type of web hosting.

What is Email Hosting? 

As said, email server hosting is a service wherein your emails and related stuff are stored on a server. 

Many best web hosting company offers free email services as part of the package but with limited features. With email server hosting, you can set up a custom email address with the email domain name matching your business or website. 

Although you can ask your web hosting to provide email server hosting as well ( most web hosts these days offer email hosting), you can even buy both the hosting services from different service providers. 

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How Does Email Hosting Work?

In business email hosting, the email you receive on your website’s domain address is routed across the www and stored on the recipient server. At this stage, the server admin will decide whether to reply or ignore, based on any spam filters, re-routing requests or if the sender is on any blacklists.

Different email service companies provide different services according to the target audience. Accordingly, some providers focus more on security while others focus on email management and filtering.

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Recommended Read: What is Web Hosting?  

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Free vs Paid Email Hosting

When it comes to getting email hosting for small businesses, you will often find email hosting providers offering free and paid hosting services. But how do they differ?

Free Email Hosting 

As fascinating it may sound, there’s no such thing as ‘free’ on the internet. Free email server hosting does come with several benefits, but these services are not completely ‘free’. First, let us look at the benefits of free email services: 

• With free services, there’s no commitment or contract, which means you can switch to any other email service. 
• Such services usually include enough file storage to meet the needs of small businesses and individuals. 

However, there are some downsides too:

• Less cloud storage
• Security risks as there are no or weaker security measures 
• No custom domain name. 
• Limited or no customer support
• No or doubtful authenticity
• Annoying ads

When we say ‘free’, it means you don’t have to pay anything for the email you’re going to use. However, free email service providers like Gmail will target their ads based on the email types you send or receive. So, there’s always be something you’d be ‘paying’ in the name of free email services to the service providers. 

A free email service is an ideal option for individuals who do not own a business or website. 

Continue to read…

Paid Email Hosting 

With paid email server hosting, you get: 

• Your personalized domain name
• More storage space
• Strong security measures like antivirus, spam filters to handle network failures and threats. 
• No Advertisements
• Access to collaboration tools and features such as address books, calendars. 
• Email synchronization across mobile phones.
• IMAP/POP3 services

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Recommended Reading: Web Hosting Security Checklist 

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Business Email Hosting – Benefits for Small Businesses

Email is an integral part of every business’s daily undertakings. Hence, even small businesses should invest in the best email services for their marketing efforts. 

• Personalized Email Address for Brand Credibility
• Economical Marketing Tool
• Builds Brand Trust
• On Top of Email & Data Security
• White-Label Email Hosting
• Personalized Storage

Here are the benefits of email server hosting for small businesses:

1. Personalized Email Address for Brand Credibility

Your email is certainly the first point of communication for your customers or clients. This is why email is a core aspect of your business. Also, small business email hosting is an easy way to build brand credibility. 

According to a recent GoDaddy survey, customers are more likely to share their payment details online with companies having a domain-based email address. Additionally, a professional email is far more effective in building trust – a necessity for landing conversions in email marketing. 

2. Economical Marketing Tool

 

Research reveals that by 2022, 50% of the global population will be using email. As such, it is significant to invest in building a strong email marketing strategy. And one of the crucial aspects of this is choosing a business email hosting package that offers an option to create a custom email address. 

Business email hosting can help your small business make an impression and solidify your brand wherever it appears, be it your email signature or your business cards. What customers see in the ‘From’ field is worth considering for return of investment for email marketing. 

3. Builds Brand Trust

As already said, a professional business email makes your company name visible to the customers. This instills a sense of trust for your brand in them. So, if a customer is curious to know more about your business, they would recognize your website immediately from the domain name. Finding you faster will also make it easy for them to know about you. 

4. On Top of Email & Data Security 

Using free email services puts your business at increased risk. It is hard to control data security aspects like privacy – whom they share your information with.

This is however not the thing with business email hosting. Also, a personalized email can streamline your onboarding process. Consistent email procedures make it easier to integrate employees. In addition, you can ensure data security during employee turnover. 

5. White-Label Email Hosting

With white label email server hosting, you get a facility to add a logo to your email account. In this way, this feature lets brands keep the identity and details of the parent service provider private and prevent their employees to know about them.

6. Personalized Storage 

In addition to several benefits of business email hosting, the email server hosting packages you get also allow you additional storage space. Of course, you can choose how to customize it as per your needs. 

Now since you know the importance of small business email hosting, next you should learn what makes an email service provider ideal for you and how you can choose the right one. 

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How To Find The Right Email Server Hosting Provider? 

When it comes to business, there’s no scope for mistakes. From choosing the right web hosting to hiring the right team and the type of email you opt for, everything should be thoughtfully selected. 

• Security
• Availability
• Administration
• Flexibility and Compatibility
• Storage

In this section, we will highlight some crucial considerations when it comes to finding the right email server hosting company for your small business. 

1. Security

According to Windows IT Pro, email protection is the top concern for new customers. And why not? Keeping email protected and its content secure helps avoid other hacking accessed through email. 

When it comes to choosing small business email hosting, you should look for email hosts that use advanced tools to protect email content. They should put in place anti-spam filtering, anti-malware, and data loss prevention capabilities. 

Also, do not overlook backing up your data. Hence, find an email host that has redundant servers across the globe, and an experts team to monitor your servers. Besides, it should also be available 24/7 and can employ disaster recovery techniques effectively.

2. Availability 

An hour of downtime in email in today’s always-on world can cost your business thousands of dollars.  A report by IDC revealed that 80 percent of small to mid-sized businesses lose over $20,000 per hour of network downtime. Hence, you should look for an email server hosting provider that guarantees 99.99% uptime.

Also, ensure that you can access your email server on your smartphone across brands. This will ensure that your employees can get their emails anytime regardless of the mobile phones they have.  

3. Administration

The good email server hosting providers are those that provide you with complete ( or partial, at least) control over your email server. However, they also offer assistance, when you need it. 

So, look for a host that offers reliable customer service in the form of 24/7 email, call and chat support. 

4. Flexibility and Compatibility 

Productivity is crucial for you as a business. Hence, your email system should work with you and not against you. Hence, find a business email system that can be synched with web-based applications and mobile devices on an enterprise level. 

Besides, you should also be able to choose what email options you need and what you don’t. Look out for a business email hosting provider that provides you with a variety of features and service levels. So that you can scale your email requirements anytime based on your business needs, as you start your web hosting business and grow in your business journey. 

5. Storage 

Nobody likes a cluttered email system that doesn’t allow you to easily sort messages. Also, there are messages that you don’t want to delete. To this, archiving is the best solution and a good email service provider will include it in your package. Also, companies that have an established archiving in place are far better options. 

Besides being able to move your messages to archives, your email host should also allow you to access your archived messages and offer your disaster recovery and continuous backup to protect your data.

If you are convinced by the perks of business email hosting and want to get email server hosting services from a reliable host, visit HostingSeekers. We have an assorted list of affordable and reliable email hosting providers that can cater to your small business email hosting needs. 

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Read on the difference between IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS

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Frequently Asked Questions 

Q 1. Which Email Hosting Service Is Best?

Ans. DreamHost, SiteGround, VPSGround, HostNamaste, A2Hosting are some of the top email server hosting providers. If you are looking for affordable and reliable email hosts, check out the listing on the web hosting directory like HostingSeekers. 

Q 2. What Email Is Best For A Business Email?

Ans. Zoho Mail, BlueHost, Office 365, Dreamhost are some of the best business email hosting providers. 

Q 3. Does Office 365 Come With Email Hosting?

Ans. Microsoft offers Office 365 on a subscription basis to provide productivity tools such as Office applications, Skype for Business, online file storage ( OneDrive), and hosted Exchange emails. The added advantage of Office 365 is that it offers different plans catering to the business needs of small enterprises. 

Q 4. Why Do I Need Email Hosting?

Ans. Business email hosting strengthens brand recall making it easier for your customers to remember your company. Also, it keeps your email content and related information safe and secure from hackers and prevents data loss. Since the email server hosting plans are usually cost-effective, they can drive your email marketing efforts effectively without much investment. 

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Conclusion

In today’s competitive internet space, it is a challenge for small businesses to leave a mark and stand out. As such, having a custom email address with the company name in it can prove extremely significant. It will not just help your customers recall you when they are in need of services but will also build trust and credibility. So, find a reliable business email hosting provider and grow your small business with world-class email server hosting.