Benefits of Email Hosting
Email marketing remains one of the most reliable ways to stay in touch with your audience. When you want to send out large numbers of emails, however, it’s important to consider what kind of email service you use. There are many reasons to consider using dedicated email hosting rather than free email for your campaigns. Let’s take a look at what email hosting is and some of the advantages it offers.
What is Email Hosting?
Email hosting is a service that provides email servers to clients. The email addresses you acquire through these services are associated with domains you own. There are several types of email hosting.
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Web Hosting Email
When you get web hosting, you will have access to the email hosting provided by the web host. The advantage of this is that you won’t have to pay any additional fees. You can usually get many, if not unlimited, email addresses associated with each domain you own. Web hosts, however, only provide limited email services and security. To get more robust email services, you will have to work with a dedicated email host.
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Free Email Hosting
There are also free email hosting services you can find on the web. The main disadvantage of these is that they are usually ad supported. This makes it difficult for you to brand yourself if you have a business. Free email hosting is also limited in the services and security it provides.
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Professional or Dedicated Email Hosting
These are services that specialize in email and offer a variety of features and services that are hard to find elsewhere. These services provide unparalleled storage, security and business features that make them a valuable tool for any business that uses email marketing. The main drawback to using these services is that they do charge a fee. Many, however, are quite reasonable considering the features they offer.
Main Advantages of Email Hosting
Not everyone needs dedicated email hosting. The average person who only sends email for social purposes doesn’t need to pay extra for this type of service. However, if you use email marketing for your business, it can provide some key advantages. Let’s discuss in more detail below.
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Ample Space
With free email, your storage space is usually going to be rather limited. Professional email hosting services provide you with large mailboxes that allow you to store as many emails as you want. The cost will depend on how much space you need.
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Security
Security is a priority when you are doing business online. You want to make sure your emails are protected, especially if they contain confidential information such as customers’ personal data.
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Spam Protection
Free email services are often not very effective at preventing spam. Premium email hosting services can provide you with additional protection against annoying spam. They can also weed out potentially dangerous emails that contain viruses or malware.
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Customization and Professional Image
Sending email from a free email address such as Gmail or Yahoo does not convey a very professional image. Free email, even those provided by web hosts, often contains ads and banners that distract your recipients from your messages. Using an email host gives you the ability to customize your email and send out ad-free messages, with very good deliverability rates!
Now let’s look at a few examples of email hosting worth considering.
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Office 365 Small Business
This is a service run by Microsoft with monthly fees starting at $4. This gives you many features, such as being able to check your email online and syncing your email with IMAP and POP3. For $5 per month you have access to Sharepoint with Office Web Apps that allows you to work on projects with other team members who are using this application. For $7 per month, you get the Full version of Office for either PC or Mac.
Check out Microsoft’s page for the details.
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Rackspace
This is a popular email service used by more than 3 million customers. With prices starting at just $2 per month, you gain access to a wide array of features, including 25GB mailboxes, the ability to send and receive 50MB attachments, email addresses customized with your domain name, custom email filtering and daily backups.
Rackspace offers a variety of plans to suit the needs of small, medium and larger businesses. For details, check out their page at http://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/webmail/
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Google Apps
Although Gmail by itself is limited in many ways, if you upgrade to Google Apps, you can use your own domain for email along with several other key benefits. This is a good email solution if you already use Google services such as Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar or Google Sites.
Google Apps allows you to integrate all of these services. You can use an existing domain name or purchase a new one to use with Google Apps. The basic Google Apps for Business plan costs $5 per month. For additional features and security, you can get value added to the plan for $10 per month. For details, see
http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/pricing.html -
Zoho
Zoho email hosting is a service where you can get up to 5GB storage for free if you use their Lite version. This allows you to use one domain and up to 5 users. If you want something a little more flexible, you can get their Standard plan for $2.50 per month and get 10GB storage and multiple domain hosting.
Zoho also has several other plans, including Premium, which gives you 25GB storage and 250GB docs storage for $10 per month. For details, see: http://www.zoho.com/mail/
Email hosting can help your business grow
There are many email hosting services. The above are just a few of the most popular ones. Having an email service that’s feature rich, secure and easy to customize can help you run email campaigns that are more efficient and that get you better results.
These services are even useful for everyday personal emails, as they help you filter out spam and give you confidence that your messages are secure.