What is email hosting and what are the benefits?

Your email address establishes your identity and reinforces your brand throughout the Internet. Every company needs it, but administering it can be a complex and sometimes costly process. The email administrator must deal with the constant demand for adds and changes, and of course, password resets as end-users forget their passwords. It is also incumbent on the administrator to enforce password policy, to ensure that end-users do not resort to easily-guessed passwords. Ideally, the administrator will impose a two-factor level of authentication, which includes a hardware token device and a PIN number. In a larger organization, having dedicated staff for email administration may be essential; but in a smaller organization, it may at the same time present a burden. Hosted email may provide a solution. The email hosting organization provides the server hardware, which eliminates the need for large up-front capital expenditures; further, they provide the bulk of the back-end administration, to avoid the need for dedicated in-house staff. Providers offering hosted email services typically locate their servers at a secure datacenter, which offers backup and archive capability, as well as failover and redundancy for higher uptime. The end-user will have a web-based interface to their own email administration, which can be securely accessed for the purpose of routine tasks such as adds and changes.

Some larger organizations, particularly those which are subject to compliance regulations or high levels of scrutiny, may prefer in-house administration and hosting of email, arguing that the in-house option affords greater control. Naturally, uptime is a vital and important factor, and any organization must choose a third party service provider, if they choose that option, with care selecting one that provides a rigorous service level guarantee, and complies with all necessary regulations and policy items concerning privacy and security.

The main advantage of course of the third party option is cost savings. Assuming that the provider provides the requisite amount of security, access to archives, features, and uptime guarantees, hosted service is almost always the most affordable option. Smaller companies especially may be facing manpower shortages, and may not have the resources available to set up and manage their own email servers, and these organizations look towards third party email hosting providers to handle the service for them, while offering premium services and 24-hour safeguarding and redundant backup.

Archives

When examining hosted email providers, an often overlooked consideration is the email archive. Increasingly, businesses are subject to regulations that require the maintenance of all email records for a predetermined period of time, which requires extensive archiving. Archiving on an individual basis (through local PST files, for example) is possible, but unhandy and often inadequate. The hosting provider should provide an easy method for archiving emails, and implementing policy that dictates how often emails should be moved to the archive. Further, the provider should include a web-based interface to the archives that allows authorized end-users to conduct searches and retrievals from the archives.

Security

Third party email hosting providers compete with hundreds of other companies to offer world-class service in controlling spam and offering virus protection. While the end-user organization should impose these controls both at the desktop and at the gateway, the provider should also provide the first layer of protection to eliminate the bulk of threats before they even reach the user's network.

Encryption is another important consideration. Many of the hosted email providers endow their mail servers with industry standard encryption, which remains in force during the entire webmail session. As a result, data sent between the server and the end user?s facility is never, or should never, be sent in the clear.

Accessibility

The accessibility (uptime) of a system further refers to availability, which is delivered on the back end through redundancy and failover. Most email hosting providers offer high availability systems that are designed with fault-tolerant hardware, which ensures redundancy providing the twin benefits of availability and protection against loss. While 100 percent accessibility is unrealistic by any standard, 99.9 percent should be attainable, and guaranteed by the provider in a written service level agreement.

Secure IMAP and POP Access

Businesses are gradually choosing email hosting solutions because they facilitate assured access to desktop email clients via IMAP or POP. All email traffic is encrypted, including login information like user names and passwords which are sent from the email client to the mail server for authentication. The finest hosting providers sustain all the popular mail clients like Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird Eudora, and Apple Mail. Various hosted email providers still tender support for Linux and BSD clients along with PDAs and pocket PCs. Whether you desire to administer your mail online or offline, a good email hosting plan ensures that it is provided in an efficient and secure manner.

Adequate Storage Space

When you sign up for an email hosting account, you are most probably provided with a robust amount of storage plan for each of your mailboxes created. Ideally, the 'mailbox full' bounceback will never occur, because the hosting provider has allocated more than enough storage for each email address, and has further imposed a system of moving older emails to backup periodically. By the same token, storage space for the backup and archive files should similarly be adequate, and easy to scale on an as needed basis.

Shared Address Book

One of the most useful features email hosting provider offer is the Address Book, as it is a convenient way to store, retrieve and use contact data. Both private and shared books are offered by hosted email providers along with the access to public network directory services, which can be used by any mail client which supports LDAP directory services. Email is such a ubiquitous way of communication that it can get out of hand over time. If you are unable to manage your messaging infrastructure from within, it is time to think about email hosting.

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