Compare Mailbox Space Hosting

The size of your email inbox included used to be a very important factor when choosing a hosting plan, but times are changing. A number of industry trends emerging over the past few years have changed the way many businesses set up their email and use their mailboxes.

A lot of businesses still use mailboxes offered by their hosting companies or even internet service providers (ISPs), but quite a few people are looking for alternatives – and they are plentiful.

Don’t get us wrong – email still matters

An essential part of modern communication, email is a basic component of most hosting providers’ packages. While instant messaging and multimedia applications like Vine, SnapChat and Twitter have certainly taken a serious bite out of its dominance in the realm of electronic interpersonal communication, email remains indispensable for businesses and formal communication.

Should you choose to set up your own email server, choosing a hosting plan that offers sufficient mailbox space per user requires an understanding of how much email your company sends and receives. How your users check, send, and receive mail is another consideration – do they only use their work PCs? Are they, like many sales teams, relying on mobile email almost exclusively? Do you use a client, or is a browser-based email client sufficient for everyone’s needs?

Lastly, it also depends on your industry – whether or not you are likely to send and receive a lot of large files on a daily basis. Whether or not you need to keep all the emails archived and available online is another question, which can also increase the amount of storage necessary for all your mail.

What hosting providers have to offer

Most hosting providers offer a relatively modest set of email options in their most basic plans – five or fewer email addresses, limited storage. More robust packages, especially with hosting providers known for “unlimited” resource allocation across the board, bring more features.

While “unlimited” email storage certainly sounds appealing, the majority of hosts still have a practical limit (if not an explicit one) on the size of email boxes, as large boxes can slow down the server for everyone (including other customers who might share your shared-hosting server).

Obviously, this concern is mitigated or even eliminated with dedicated hosting, but this option is accompanied by significant additional expense. Fortunately, most users do not require fast SSD storage for email, so it is possible to get away with much cheaper mechanical storage options.

It is also worth noting that some businesses, depending on their IT infrastructure, may require Microsoft Exchange support, which means they will have to use Microsoft platforms instead of open source solutions, thus adding to the overall cost of setting up an email server.

Small businesses can choose free, open-source alternatives rather than proprietary Microsoft platforms, but they still have to deal with a number of technical issues.

There is another alternative

While building your own mail server has a number of advantages, it also requires a fair amount of work – you still have to deal with SSL certificates, properly set up POP3 or IMAP, be mindful of port configuration on clients and so on. You can also install a webmail client on your server, allowing you to access email via the browser.

Hosting companies usually cover the basics and you may not need to invest a lot of time and effort into setting these services up, but the question is whether you should even bother in the first place.

While bigger organisations usually require the flexibility provided by hosting companies (or even dedicated mail server built from scratch, with no reliance on the host for support), a lot of small businesses are turning to Gmail. And no, this does not mean that their email addresses look like ‘[email protected]’.

Google recognised the need for an email service specifically designed to cater to small businesses, built on top of Gmail. While Gmail already has an excellent reputation and seamless integration with Google Docs, Google Drive and other Google services, including mobile apps. Through Google Apps you can use your own domain dame in place of ‘gmail.com’ – which means you can forget about all the hassle involved in setting up your own mailbox.

All you need to do to set up a business Gmail account is to sign up for a Google Apps account, enter your domain name and fill out the necessary forms. Google will then create a new Google Account and Google Apps Account for your small business and guide you through the rest of the process. As far as coding goes, you will usually have to add a single HTML file to your site, just to prove your actually own the domain.

This can also be an attractive proposition for startups, spin-offs or various projects with a limited lifecycle. Rather than setting up a mail server for a one-off event or promotional campaign under its own domain, you can easily use Gmail instead.