Email has become an essential form of communication in today’s digital age. It’s not just about sending and receiving messages; it’s about ensuring that the messages you send and receive are secure, easily accessible, and delivered without delay. It’s also about making sure the messages you don’t want, aka spam, are reliably filtered and kept out of your inbox. An email hosting service can help with all of these points.
What is Email Hosting?
Email hosting is a service that allows you to send, receive, and store emails on servers provided by a company. The email hosting provider typically provides a web-based administration panel allowing you to self-manage your mailboxes and other aspects of the service including forwards, aliases and advanced mailbox settings like spam filtering and vacation messages. Email hosting is often bundled with additional, related services such as document management, file transfer, email marketing, transactional sending, and VOIP phone service. While most web hosts and domain registration providers offer email hosting as an additional service, many businesses choose to use a dedicated email hosting provider for their email.
Benefits of Using an Email Hosting Service
1. Professionalism and Brand Consistency
One of the most attractive qualities of email hosting over free providers such as Gmail and Outlook is that you can set your address up at your website’s domain. In fact, having a domain name registered is a pre-requisite when signing up for email hosting service or setting up a website. Using your own domain not only makes your email address look more professional but also improves your brand consistency. A solid brand identity makes you more accessible to potential clients or customers and indicates that you are serious about your business.
2. Scalability
An email hosting service offers email hosting plans that allow you to scale as your business grows. This includes having the ability to increase storage capacity, adding more mailboxes or even being able to send transactional or marketing messages in higher volumes without disrupting the delivery of your regular messages.
3. Security
Email hosting providers will provide you with secure SSL and TLS type encrypted connections between your preferred email application or desktop client. This helps to ensure that your password and message contents are encrypted in transit and minimizes the risk of a mailbox being compromised.
4. Spam and Virus Protection
Email hosting providers include server level virus scanning and spam filtering which helps protect your users from malware, viruses and other threats that bad actors often try and exploit by email. Spam and virus protection is constantly adapting to meet emerging trends in abuse so it is important to make sure your email host uses up to date scanning tools on their servers. Finally, it is important for your users to know that not all threats can be detected and to use caution when opening or replying to emails.
5. Enhanced Accessibility
As mentioned above, email hosts will provide you with secure POP3, IMAP and SMTP server settings that you can use in popular email programs like Outlook, Thunderbird and Apple Mail. But you can also use these settings to connect the native mail apps on iOS and Android devices allowing you to have your messages on the go. A secure webmail is also standard in email hosting platforms allowing you to access your emails remotely.
6. Building Trust
Having a professional email address that uses your domain name can build trust among your clients or customers. Having all of your employees and agents of your business united with email addresses at a single domain eliminates confusion and reflects a professionalism that isn’t possible using random gmail.com or yahoo.com type addresses.
In conclusion, using an email hosting service provider can offer numerous benefits for businesses of all sizes. It not only enhances professionalism and brand consistency but also ensures security and scalability. If you already have your domain name registered, the next step is to find the right email hosting provider for your business.