Leah, here, reporting from the Great White North (which is currently somewhat rainy and less white that usual.)
Today I would like to say a few words about email systems and small business. As a consultant, I have worked with a number of small businesses who are still running servers, often sitting behind DSL or cable Internet connections, to host their own email. Usually this happens for one of the following two reasons:
- Legacy : Often small businesses have their own email systems, well, because they have always had their own email systems.
- Control : There is a feeling of control over the email traffic coming into and out of the site.
I realize that I am mostly speaking to a hosting community here, so you may well be wondering where I am going with this. To put it in a nutshell, it is my opinion that most small businesses should run, not walk, to a hosting provider and get their email hosted by a responsible third party. I hope that my perspective as a consultant may provide hosting providers some useful ideas to market email hosting services to the small business. Also I hope to provide insight into what the small business may be looking for, to provide inspiration to email hosts.
Over the years, I have helped many small businesses set up their own email servers, manage spam, and customize them to fit their environments. Eventually, I have helped nearly every customer I have dealt with to move to a larger email hosting provider. Here are the reasons why:
- Cost : The reality is, that it is a good deal cheaper to pay someone else to deal with spam, security, hardware, and other issues these days, then it is for a small business to have to hire a consultant to come in and deal with every singled small support issue, every hardware failure, every upgrade, etc.
- Reliability : A larger host is able to provide redundant servers, off-site backup, and fail-over paths that would simply not be possible for a small business to emulate. The average small business' email recovery plan involves everyone using a Gmail account until the system is back online.
- Spam Control : A small business is generally not in a position to keep up with the constant updates and tweaks needed to keep ahead of the latest spamming and virus pushers.
In order to maintain a decent quality of service level, the average small business is well advised to move to a managed email solution, provided by a third party. This is pretty obvious.
But the reality is, there are still a huge number of small businesses out there that are not willing to make this leap, despite it's obvious benefits. The previously mentioned arguments should take care of most of the small businesses that are still running their own email for legacy reasons. But what about the other companies?
Now we come to the issue of control.
The email hosting company that can give the client a good feeling of control over what is happening is going to really be able to win in this market. People want to be able to add, disable, delete, and otherwise manage email accounts within their company themselves. People want to be able to say that their employees can not use email during certain hours, or possibly that they cannot send email to certain domains. People want to be able to have an archive account where all email in and out of their domain is logged, so that it can be reviewed.
To many of us, this level of control may seem strange, or even illegal, but these are features that would really make the difference for the average small business owner when he considers making the jump to hosted email.
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