Email is the focal point of nearly every business. It’s the easiest mode to communicate, both internally and externally. It’s the place where you get your most important notifications. It also gives you storage space for storing critical data and shared files. While it may be tempting to pick your email provider based on brand awareness, it’s important to examine your options prior to committing to a service that will end up being your team’s most-used service. The best email hosting supplier won’t just let you reliably send and receive emails for your own domain, but it may likewise offer extra tools, for example, shared contacts and calendars for your organization.
The 3 Main Options for Email Hosting –
When looking for email hosting, the first choice you have to make is the way you’ll host your email. You have three primary choices:
1 Shared Web and Email Hosting: Most web hosting providers additionally offer email hosting. For instance, if you have your website through a supplier like InMotion, you can have your email there also. Frequently, email hosting is incorporated with your web hosting subscription for free.
2 Self-Hosted Email: If you have your very own servers, you can host your emails as opposed to using a third-party supplier. While self-hosting gives more control and customization, it has its cons too. The additional costs of servers and system admin to look after them, along with the challenge of keeping your email from being marked as spam, often makes third-party hosting a better option.
3 Third-Party Email Hosting: If you require a number of features than what your web host provides, look into hosted email providers. A third-party email host gives you a chance to stay away from the costs of self-hosting. Furthermore, a membership to a hosted email service often comes with other tools you need to run your business: shared contacts and calendars, built-in video conferencing, team chat, and more.
Finally, it’s imperative to comprehend the difference between an email hosting provider and an email client. An email host gives you a chance to send and receive email across networks. An email client is an application you use to write and read emails. Your email host and client don’t need to be the same. For instance, you can send and receive emails hosted through G Suite on a desktop or mobile Microsoft Outlook app.
Features one shall look for in an Email Hosting Service?
When you bring together your email and web hosting, there’s not a lot to look for as far as features go; you get whatever features your web host happens to offer. What’s more, when you self-host, you develop your own features; the choices to pick from are more for the tools you use to manage and modify your email.
The real decision-making, at that point, comes when you’re buying a third-party email hosting service. There are a ton of features to consider and assess, and what’s important varies from business to business. For instance, organizations in healthcare and banking have strict compliance regulations to adhere to that may not be as critical for a marketing agency.
So rather than considering every possible feature of email hosting providers, we contemplate at the features that apply to most business types:
Custom Domains: All of the email hosts featured below let you create email accounts utilizing your company’s website domain address.
24/7 Support: If you don’t have a system admin on staff, you shouldn’t have to hire one just to deal with your email. We chose tools that offer around-the-clock support, so there is somebody to help when you have questions or issues.
Security Features: You could route all email through a third-party application to get features like spam and virus-filtering, but most organizations are in an ideal situation utilizing a host that has those features built in.
Mailbox Storage: If your employees make business choices or speak with customers/clients by email, they’ll require a lot of storage space for filing old emails. The suppliers we chose shall offer substantial storage capacity per user.
Sending Size Limits: Each featured provider gives you an option to send emails and attachments that are at least 25MB in size. Many other additionally offer file sharing or FTP tools that let you send larger files.
The 8 Best Hosted Email Services –
1- Office 365 –
Best email hosting service for organizations that use multiple Microsoft applications
If your employees heavily depend on Microsoft Office applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to do their work, the best alternative for your email facilitating is probably Office 365’s Business Premium Plan.
Office 365 Business Premium packages the majority of all the features you require from a hosted email service—email sending and receiving, custom domain addresses, and spam and data loss prevention—alongside the Office apps your employees utilize day by day at work. With a single subscription, you get hosted email and web, desktop, and mobile access to Microsoft’s Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, Skype, and OneNote applications.
Office 365 Tools: Email, Calendar, Contacts, Internal Social Network, File Editing & Collaboration, File Storage and Sharing, Voice & Video Conferencing, Instant Messaging, Intranet, etc
2- G Suite –
Best email hosting service for clarity and keeping everything on the cloud
If your company favor utilizing cloud-based tools, G Suite is one of your most solid option for email hosting. G Suite is Google’s alternative to Office 365, connecting email hosting with the organization’s own communication and collaboration applications. With a G Suite membership, you get at least 30GB of storage space per user. however higher-level plans give unlimited storage capacity and in addition shared contacts and calendars.
G Suite Tools: Email, Calendar, Contacts, File Editing and Collaboration, Team Chat, File Storage and Sharing, Internal Social Network, Voice and Video Conferencing, Instant Messaging Intranet, and Tasks
3- Zoho Workplace –
Best email hosting service for email and collaboration tools with a tight budget
Zoho Workplace is Zoho’s rendition of Office 365 and G Suite, offering hosted email, calendars, and contacts, and also Zoho’s own communication and collaboration applications: Docs (for cloud storage), Office Suite (for developing and teaming up on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations).
Zoho Mail is a modern interpretation of email with social networking-style features. Rather than sending a long message with a subject and signature every single time, you can send a quick stream message to associates or share an email from a client that you need to collaborate on. It includes shared email inboxes as well, so everybody on your marketing team can have a similar partner and press emails, searching through them all along with their personal emails. Also, it’s a tabbed application, so you can switch between your inbox, calendar, and a draft email in a tap.
4- Rackspace –
Best email hosting service for organizations that only need email hosting
When you require both email hosting and a large number of communication and collaboration applications, the suites above is very apt, you get multiple tools even for a monthly premium. But if all you truly require is email hosting, it doesn’t make sense to pay additional for all the add-on tools. All the options considered, Rackspace might be the ideal choice.
Rackspace has two extraordinary alternatives to consider: email hosting or Hosted Exchange.
Rackspace’s center hosted email service provides all the nuts and bolts you have to deal with your team’s email, calendars, and contacts. Access all three on Rackspace’s webmail application, or sync it to your favored desktop and/ or mobile email client. The basic plan gives you only the primary features you need, however, higher-level packages are accessible that offer tools like cloud storage and instant messaging.
5- Creative –
Best email hosting service for economical email hosting with minimal features
Email hosting delivers an enterprise-class messaging solution with full-featured functionality, generous email storage and grows with your business. Creative not only provides professional email service for you and your company’s employees but also ensures that all users are protected from email viruses and spam.
Creative Email Hosting Key Features –
a) 99.9% uptime guaranteed
b) Feature-rich webmail for any time, anywhere access
c) An automated control panel to manage your account online
d) Email that works with third-party email clients like MS Outlook
6- FastMail –
Best email hosting service for customized storage alternatives to manage costs
For a tool fixated just on the email essentials of messages, contacts, and calendar events, FastMail is an extraordinary tool for people and organizations alike. It’s incredible and quick, with web and mobile applications that make it simple to figure out who said what in an email discussion. You can add a number of domains and subdomains to your account to give each colleague an email address that matches their department if you’d like. Furthermore, to deal with your emails, you can include snappy channels or program propelled channels to arrange your own messages or store documents for consistency.
FastMail focuses on the core email experience, in addition to this, it includes the business-centered team features you’d anticipate. You can share calendars and contacts across your entire company, add custom branding to the application and login screen, and add an organization footer to everybody’s emails. It even includes some extra features, giving you a chance to store files by your email attachments and access them by FTP.