In today’s technologically advanced world, email is an essential part of any business’s means of communication. Depending on your preferences, you can choose to host your business email accounts on an in-house server or on a hosted cloud service. Although both choices have pros and cons, the cloud offers some significant advantages over in-house servers, thus making it the wiser option for most businesses. The most important benefits of cloud-based email hosting services are detailed below.
Speed and efficiency
If your business hosts its email service on its own servers, it will be limited by its in-house storage and processing resources, which can slow things down significantly. Hosted cloud servers, on the other hand, have seemingly unlimited resources, allowing you to access your accounts, download attachments and organize your inbox with ease from any location.
Reliability
Whether you host your email on your own or in the cloud, your accounts should be accessible from any location with Internet access. However, if your company servers malfunction, you won’t be able to access your accounts until they’re repaired. If the problem occurs outside office hours, you may miss important messages or even lose sales while you’re waiting for repairs to be made. Email hosting providers, however, offer round-the-clock customer service, so if the servers go down for whatever reason, the hosting provider will begin repairs immediately, reducing the amount of time you’d otherwise spend waiting to access your account.
Convenience
Managing an in-house email service can result in many headaches. When employees run into problems, it will be up to your IT team to fix the problem, such as getting servers back online as quickly as possible when they fail. You must also back up important files, keep the company’s email accounts secure and deal with any external threats from hackers. When you choose cloud-based hosting, however, all these issues become the responsibility of the hosting provider, allowing you and your employees to focus their time and energy on more important tasks.
Reduced costs with a hosted cloud service
Although it may seem counterintuitive, choosing to host your business email service on a cloud server instead of an in-house alternative can actually lower your operational costs. With an in-house server, you must purchase the storage space, bandwidth and other resources necessary to manage your email accounts. Because you can’t predict the exact amount of resources you’ll use each month, you may find yourself paying for unused space.
With cloud-based email hosting, you pay for only the resources you use, enabling you to scale your services up or down depending on your needs. Furthermore, since your IT team will have one less responsibility, you won’t need to keep as many professionals on staff.
As society continues to become more technologically dependent, more consumers are relying on email to communicate with businesses. To get the most out of your email relationships with customers, your service needs to be reliable, fast, secure and accessible at all times. Fortunately, cloud-based email hosting can provide you with all of these benefits, allowing your business to be more streamlined and efficient.