The digital age has opened a large spectrum of opportunities for entrepreneurs in terms of online marketing, payment processing, and internet enabled communications such as email. The main focus of all online activities must be aimed at establishing a robust and legitimate identity of business.
This brings us to adoption of unique email address which is backed by domain name instead of generic mail address. The process of availing a domain name to create unique email identity is referred to as email hosting.
Attractive features
Email hosting can be leveraged to upload digital content. This feature of email hosting is just like web hosting and in other words, enterprises can operate official email accounts that help them build unique identity. If your company is using yahoo or Gmail supported email address, then there is a possibility that your potential clients may not perceive your company to be a professionally managed organization.
There is a general feeling that generic email addresses are used by fly by night operators or by companies that may not be serious about services. If you are planning to avail web hosting services from reputed provider, then there is every possibility that email hosting feature is included in the hosting plan. You can also avail independent email hosting option that does not make it mandatory to purchase web hosting plan.
Making a choice
The decision to select a particular email service provider or a specific email solution entirely depends on the needs of the organization. It is actually very difficult to select an email service because the common facility of send and/or receive is offered by every service provider. This underlines the significance of studying features of every potential email service provider and understanding the pros and cons of these services.
In a nutshell, you need to understand and compare email services in terms of the two main email hosting categories that are discussed below.
Host enabled email services
Thus category of email services is commonly encountered in web hosting. Thanks to the competition among hosting service providers, email hosting is usually included in the website hosting package. The quintessential control panel used by almost all web hosts allows a simple and user-friendly email account features. The beauty of cPanel lies in the fact that users can manage web hosting as well as email services from its intuitive panel. The biggest advantage of using these email services is the simplicity and convenience of creating email accounts without any hassles.
However, in spite of such user friendly attributes and benefits of economy there are few downsides to the hosted services that are essentially provided as add-on offerings. These services will be lacking in couple of important features since the services are not part of core offerings.
In the initial phase of web hosting, the add-on email services can be the most attractive feature because the overall requirement of resources is bare minimum. If you are proposing to include large volume of email addresses and thereby need to scale up storage, then this option will miserably fail to support your future plans. In order to make sure that the email solution also grows with you organization, you need to find a dedicated email hosting service provider.
Dedicated option of email service
As the name suggests, dedicated email platform is designed to facilitate a single user and hence it is packed with a plethora of additional features which are not available in the earlier option we have discussed.
The additional attributes of dedicated email service can include calendar management, file sharing, in addition to instant messenger service. In terms of performance also this choice of email service offers far better output as compared with shared mail services that are part of web hosting plans.
By adopting a dedicated email service, you can also design a unique email solution that caters to unique needs of your business with help of customization facilities. Dedicated email helps businesses build a robust communication platform that delivers scalability and flexibility to accommodate growing needs.
Another advantage of these services lies in the continuous monitoring facilities to help large organizations seamlessly handle communication workloads. If you need to have a unified platform to enable resource utilization as well as storage management of your email communications, then a dedicated email platform is the only solution.
In terms of cons, a dedicated email service will result in higher expenditure if you are planning to enable a larger user base to avail email access. Secondly, a new enterprise may not have sufficient expertise to manage web hosting services and email services from two different platforms.
In conclusion
Large enterprises should adopt dedicated email services because these are capable of serving broad spectrum of communication needs. Startup enterprises are not geared up to handle complexities of managing separate services and therefore a web host enabled email service can be a perfect option.