A user's guide to hosting Email services, Exchange Hosting and Business email hosting in India. Email Hosting Email hosting runs on email servers and are different from webmail sites. They are used usually by small and medium businesses size – because bigger businesses run their own email hosting service – and they offer large number of accounts, custom configuration, provides manage user’s own domain name. Email hosting services thus differ from typical end-user email providers such as webmail sites. They cater mostly to demanding email users and Small and Mid Size (SME) businesses, while larger enterprises usually run their own email hosting service. Email hosting providers allow for premium email services along with custom configurations and large number of accounts. In addition, hosting providers manage user's own domain name, including any email authentication scheme that the domain owner wishes to enforce in order to convey the meaning that using a specific domain name identifies and qualifies email senders. Email Hosting is a Web Hosting niche aimed at Business grade email users and high volume newsletter providers. These are serious customers who use specialized email service as a vital part of their business.
Email Hosting companies run only email services on their servers. The fact that there are no other services hogging the same resources, itself improves reliability. Serious business users prefer to keep email with a specialized Email hosting provider, away from the problems they might face with their website provider. They don’t want to move their email accounts around from one Web Host to another, should they be dissatisfied with any other service. Most email hosting providers offer advanced premium email solutions hosted on dedicated custom email platforms. The technology and offerings of different email hosting providers can therefore vary with different needs. Email offered by most webhosting companies is usually more basic standardized POP3 based email and webmail based on open source webmail applications like Horde or Squirrelmail. Almost all webhosting providers offer standard basic email while not all email hosting providers offer webhosting. As with any Web Hosting niche, disk space and traffic needs to be tailored to the requirement of the niche user. A high storage business email account would allow users to store email in the 5GB range. POP3 allows users to download their email on programs like Outlook or Eudora. Business users rarely use webmail any more. POP3 has become a defacto standard, and email users have come to expect it. Imap allows users to read email using programs like Outlook, without downloading all of them. For example if you receive 500MB of email daily, you can quickly browse through them, and download only the ones you want to reat. SMTP allows users to send email through the email server. Email Hosting providers install spam reduction tools to allow you to send regular email, but not large volumes of email, which may result in spam. Special tools like webmail for online viewing of email is also an essential. Exchange Hosting in India For most small and medium businesses, the cost of running a Microsoft Exchange server in-house is simply too much. Upfront costs can exceed $10,000, plus your need dedicated staff to maintain the server. This is why managed Exchange hosting or Exchange outsourcing is preferred by smaller businesses. Exchange server outsourcing means that a specialist IT company runs the technology and charges businesses a small monthly fee to outsource Exchange server. Exchange email outsourcing allows businesses to enjoy the same enterprise-strength IT that Fortune 500 companies have, but at a price they can afford. Outsourcing Microsoft Exchange is becoming popular as small businesses are realizing the benefits of a managed Exchange server. Exchange email outsourcing allows your staff to worry about your business instead of your email. Also, through Exchange server outsourcing, companies can rest assured that their email is safe and secure. Business Email Hosting in India With the Indian economy in full bloom, spread of IT enabled services, and growing business corporate sizes, secure and reliable email hosting is becoming anecessity for most companies in India. The demand is not limited to the big enterprises but a large number of small and medium sized businesses are opting for special business email hosting so that there communication remains up and secure all the time. Indian companies are opting for 3 primary services: Microsoft Exchange Server deployed inhouse for large enterprises Managed Exchange Email Hosting for small and medium sized businesses Managed Business Email Hosting Solutions like RightMX which are similar to Microsoft Exchnage but can offer more features and flexibility at many fronts ..and also at a less cost, which is often a concern in India. The market for hosted e-mail mailboxes is poised for rapid growth due to the economics of cloud computing and the entry of new vendors. After a decade of slow growth, a market which had been the province of small suppliers has been rapidly transformed into a market where the largest IT companies are aggressively competing. The kinds of economies of scale that the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo and Google can offer with their tens and hundreds of millions of users will send e-mail prices plummeting over the next few years. Gartner predicts that by 2012, hosters will offer enterprises with generic mail and calendar needs the opportunity to make significant savings on total e-mail operating costs with prices set to fall from the current average of $10 per user per month to $2 per user per month. The demand for e-mail storage will also create demand for hosted services. Most organizations currently cap mailboxes at around 200MB and allow the creation of local archives to accommodate needs for more storage. However many organizations would like to move away from local archives and would be attracted to a more cost-effective hosting model, where one-gigabyte mail stores are now the starting point. The growth of hosted e-mail will start with small companies, move through midsize companies and finally become an appealing model to the largest enterprises by 2012. E-mail is only the starting point for a vast move to hosted services. Hosting vendors will bundle instant messaging, presence and teamware services along with e-mail. E-mail will also be increasingly tied to social software tools. With all the big players entering into the market and increasing demand for email hosting, the business email hosting services are bound to grow exponentially in India.
|