A website or social networking profile is the first thing potential customers or visitors see when they get to know your business but, what happens when they decide to contact you? Have you considered to what extent the way you communicate influences the image that the end-user acquires of you? Find out why it’s important to have business communication built-in and how to choose the email solution for your business wisely.
Where to Start From?
The way we communicate changes every day and with it, the services we use to communicate. Once upon a time, the phone was the main tool we used to keep in touch with our clients and associates. Intense email communication has, somehow, always been reserved for big businesses. However, today (more precisely, a long-ago) this is no longer the case.
Although we’ve witnessed several iterations of all kinds of online mass communication systems, ranging from ICQ and MSN via Google Chat to Facebook Messenger, Skype, and Slack and, even though everyone has always tried to bring something new that would replace the email, that never happened. Email is, de facto, still with us and it will be for a very, very long time.
Today, email is an integral part of our daily routines, so much that we even stopped noticing how much we rely on it and how much it means to us. Because of this, very often we don’t see all the important aspects of the system we use every day because – what exactly is there that’s so complicated and important?
However, choosing the right email system to use every day isn’t such an easy task, especially when it comes to business communication. There are many questions that need answers, which most of us often simply ignore. For example, if you’re a business owner – do you still communicate with others from your domain or use addresses from free email providers? It seems irrelevant, but the situation is completely different.
However, if you’re ready to think about important aspects, you should consider the following questions before deciding:
- How much do you rely on email on a daily basis to communicate with others?
- How critical is the availability of email on the day-to-day functioning of the business itself? For example, if you receive orders through a website, what will be the damage if a customer orders something and you don’t receive information about a new order?
- Does your business require sending a large number of emails, both internally and externally?
- Do you really want to miss out on essential information while fighting the spam and viruses that have taken over your Inbox, or – worse – being a victim of fraud because the spam filter hasn’t done its job properly?
- Is there a reason why complicated configuration of mobile and desktop clients should negatively affect your business?
- How important is mobile synchronization, as well as synchronization of contacts and calendars for the whole team of people?
What Email Options Are Available?
It’s well known that the needs, the number of resources, the way of doing business, but also the internal organization differ in small and large companies. Due to scarce resources, small businesses often opt for more affordable or free solutions, while large firms have the opportunity to spend large sums of money to develop their systems and businesses.
In both cases, the basic goal is the same – to provide maximum quality in accordance with the features and to be accessible to the end-user.
Business Email With Your Internet Service Provider (ISP)
New technologies have brought new opportunities for business development but, unfortunately, we’re witnessing that many businesses use the email addresses or extensions they receive as part of the Internet service they use. This type of communication is a bad practice that can often call into question the professionalism and credibility of the company in the eyes of visitors. After all, does it seem more confident to you when you see addresses like, for example, [email protected] or [email protected]?
The disadvantages of this email solution are, first of all, that the provision of email services to Internet service providers isn’t a primary activity and often such services carry little or no antispam and antivirus protection, too little space, lack of webmail access, and so on. Let’s add that the ISP may at any time decide to terminate the email service, which may cause business problems to you.
Business Email on Free Email Service
Closely related to the practice described in the previous paragraph is the frequent case of having an email address used for business purposes, ending with @gmail, @hotmail, @outlook, etc. Such email addresses primarily appear unprofessionally in the business world and also greatly reduces the level of trust that the recipient of such messages feels about the business with which he communicates.
Numerous studies have indicated that one in four people refuses to share personal or credit card information when interacting with a business whose email account doesn’t contain the business name.
Business Email Within the Web Hosting Service
For small teams and companies, a slightly better solution in this direction would be to use an email account as part of a leased hosting service. The positive sides are based on the fact that the owner of the hosting account can create business email accounts that match the domain name, which leads to other benefits such as the ability to create dedicated email addresses for each company department, as well as special addresses for employees, of course, all at the same domain.
Disadvantages of Using Email on Standard Web Hosting
The main disadvantages are primarily related to the size of the space and the possibilities of spam filters. By leasing a hosting package, the user certainly gets at his disposal a certain space in which he can store all his files, databases, in fact – his entire website. It can use the remaining available space to create a company email account. Please note that in shared hosting, as its name implies, space and IP address on one server are shared between all users.
You may be wondering how and if it can affect you?
Problem With Spam Messages
Imagine the following situation: you have standard web hosting and your site and email accounts reside on the same server along with all other accounts. At one point, one of the accounts you share space with starts sending a large number of spam messages for unknown reasons. What happens then? The sender’s IP address is automatically blacklisted. This development of the situation results in all sent messages from all accounts on that server, including yours, being marked as spam until the problem is resolved. It’s certainly not a situation you want to have, right?
The reason for this problem is in a shared environment where the negative consequences of one part of the users are distributed to all and the spam filter itself, which has a task to meet the different needs of a large number of users on the server, isn’t able to adapt to only one user. On the other hand, the opposite situation might happen, i.e. an over-tightened spam filter can mark as spam those messages that aren’t spam.
Space Sharing
Sharing space with other hosting accounts on a single server can cause other inconveniences that can affect email availability. For example, a heavy server load can cause connection problems, which may result in slower sending of messages or limit the number of messages that can be sent per account for, let’s say, an hour.
Creating an email account as an open option within the available space of a hosting account also has some limitations. It often happens that a user’s website is hacked and when that happens, the hosting provider is forced to shut down the account that the hacked website is on so that it doesn’t interfere with other users on shared hosting. With the shutdown of the account, until the problem of hacking is resolved, complete access to email is interrupted which for a business that, for example, receives daily orders electronically can be a disaster.
Finally, there’s the issue of physical disk space. While it’s possible to rent a hosting service with “unlimited” disk space, there’s still a certain limit, which usually refers to the number of files that you can store within your service, so even though you may not be consuming a large amount of space, you’ll have to delete your messages.
Building a business-critical app and email on standard web hosting can be resolved with database hosting services that often come free and will help you scale and process requests with fast speed and utmost reliability – MySQL hosting. Whether you’re seeking cheap plans or those with tons of upgraded features and extras, MySQL hosts are a great place. Simply put, MySQL databases are often paired with software programs (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla…) or codes (PHP, C, Java…) that use databases to add your website’s content. With MySQL hosting, you’ll get great storage and bandwidth resources.
Business Email as the Perfect Solution to All Business Problems
Separating mail server from a website and other online services is always good practice. Very often, people are mistaken that renting a professional email service is a big expense reserved only for very large companies. This is far from the truth, especially considering all the benefits that such a service brings with it.
If you really take your business seriously, then you know how expensive unavailability, spam, potential phishing scams, malware, and all the other problems that can happen at critical times can cost.
How’s Business Mail Different From Standard Web Hosting?
To put it simply, email hosting provides everything that standard shared hosting is unable to provide due to its configuration. This type of service implies the existence of a special email server that’s intended only for you and your accounts with the ability to configure it to your wishes and needs. So, it’s a special and safe place for stable internal and external business communication.
What Are The Benefits Of Business Email Hosting?
Security and Privacy
The advantage of using the business email service is, first of all, reflected in the high degree of security and privacy of the data, since space and IP addresses aren’t shared with anyone. So, unlike shared hosting, there’s no possibility of questioning a delivery of messages due to a problem created by another user of the standard hosting service.
Emphasis is on advanced spam and antivirus protection, which is an integral part of the service including daily monitoring of incoming and outgoing messages in order for each email to go to the destination to which it was sent and vice versa.
Setup and Resources
Business email service was created with the aim of providing maximum functionality and using, at the same time, a simple and fast interface that allows managing the domain, creating email addresses, aliases, but also setting quotas for individual users. In this way, service resources can be tailored to meet the specific needs of business and communication.
Availability at All Times
In today’s world of modern communications, speed and crisis response can sometimes be critical to the business. With email accounts on a dedicated server, the availability of messages, no matter the location or type of device, is beyond question. At the same time, modern webmail access and full synchronization with mobile devices ensure maximum availability at all times.
Support
Every business requires support and its task is to respond at a critical moment in order to solve a potential problem effectively. When encountering a problem, it’s always important to have an invisible friend on hand in the presence of available and professional support who can troubleshoot any problems and resolve concerns. Within the business email service, support is always there to enable all aspects of the email service to work at its best.
