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.
Even in this case, it is often better to have the mail server be a hosted server in a co-located environment, to help avoid hardware and local problems with the network.
In other cases, where technical IT people are not available on site, I believe that it is generally good to wait until the company is of a size where a staff IT person, at least a few days a week, is or can be justified. I feel that most companies will be frustrated trying to get a consultant in to maintain their email systems over time, and will find themselves spending a lot of money to do so. It can be difficult to maintain the same consultant over a long period of time. Often a new consultant may want to restructure everything to suit his or her vision of how the email system should function. At best, each new consultant will have to spend a fair amount of time learning how the current system works, which can be frustrating for both the business and for the consultant.
Many small businesses with moderate email volume can host their email internally for very little cost. For example, we recently helped a client setup a new server for their email. They had been using a Cobalt Raq 3 for more than 5 years. They hosted their web site, email and some files on this system which was stashed away in the closet connected to their DSL line and a battery backup.
Though the client said email and their new file sharing system on their site was increasingly important, I still could not convince them to take a $75.00/month server. He purchased a $400 server from Dell, paid about $300 in setup costs, and bought a $200 Plesk license. So for under $1000, he had a new server to house his email, file sharing and site. He expects this to last another 3-5 years, which works out to be less than $28/month in the worst case.
At the $30/month price point, you are going to find few services that can rival the in-house solution of having your own server, being able to reboot it in 30 minutes or less (or within minutes during business hours), running a local samba server for the file sharing and other benefits by having the system in-house will bring.
These are tangible benefits that people use everyday. The issue of reliability and redundancy only occurs when the system fails. This client has only had one serious failure in more than 5 years. Personal experience is paramount in the decision making process.
1. Most servers will not last for 5 years any more without needing hardware replacements or servicing. We are seeing an average life of about 2 years on hard drives, and that is if you are lucky. If you look at online statistics, generally people say between 3-5 years, meaning best case scenario is that your drives last that long.
2. While you can leave software in place, without any updates or changes in five years, it presents huge security and usability problems. Based on my experience, I would say that most email systems need an update at least every 6 months to help keep users from being absolutely flooded with spam and viruses. The rate at which new schemes to push spam to the public have been appearing has done nothing but increase over time, and I do not expect things to slow down.
3. It is my experience that most small companies require at least some amount of external support, usually given by a consultant, which is not generally free.
4. The business is still spending money to cool, and power a server that may not be necessary. These days you can get a Linksys router that will host a website, share files, and do most other firewall and network functions that are common to small businesses. These things cost around $200, use a lot less power, are less noisy, better for the environment, and so on.
Because of these two things, I think that assuming the initial hardware cost and setup price is all that will have to be paid is not really a good assumption to make. For $30 a month, it is pretty easy to get domain email hosted, and most ISP's will wrap email hosting into your existing business connection plan for a very reasonable cost.
In the best scenario, assume things keep running with little need for software updates, hardware fixes, or disaster recovery. I still believe that the user experience will be better with a hosted service. After a couple years, any remote webmail software will be out of date and hard to use. If no updates are made, users will see an increase in spam, viruses, and hoaxes.
Worse, however, if something does happen. Without off-site backups and spending a lot of money, it is hard to recover from such a disaster.
Obviously, if you have someone in the company who is willing to deal with software updates, keeping up with the hardware, and user support, then this could be cost effective, but I think even in this case you are, for the most part, breaking even. For some the benefits of keeping everything in house will outweigh all of these things, which is fine. In fact, this is good for people like me, because it keeps me employed :)
I worked with a client that was a government agency that had their .com tourism/economic development website and email shutdown by a hosting company because an email with a virus hit its email servers (a few years after I had relocated out of the area and they were depending on different company by the way). Never mind it got past THEIR anti-virus solutions as well as the agency's. Rather than use common sense and look at the fact that if THEIR solution failed and the agency's did as well, that it was due to the newness of the virus and not because the agency was abusing email somehow (as if they were wanting to send out virus infected emails...I mean come on!). Instead they shut everything down in accordance with their 'policy' which was obscure and legally questionable at best.
Such 'service' is anything but.
Too many hosted email service providers are slow to react to support needs and pretty much impossible to reach on a weekend. One of the other posters mentioned co-located servers, and that's not a bad idea at all, in fact, I would encourage that route before a hosted one. Still, for most small businesses, I have found that most feel more secure with their own server, especially in rural and smaller communities.
I've dropped by somewhere and done tune-ups and fixes or tweaked workstations or checked some perceived problem on a network and spent an hour or two doing something for no charge at all. It's called taking care of clients.
If you set them up right, create decent policies both for the server and employees and spend even an hour or two talking to them to explain the policies and why they exist, an email server can run pretty trouble free for a small business. Any rebooting and minor maintenance can be done by the average employee if a consultant has even the most basic technical writing skills and presents them with a 1-10 page guide covering the basics.
Anyone who can't do those things---or won't---probably shouldn't be allowed to be messing around with someone's servers anyway. I wouldn't let such a person near mine. Another point in favor of doing it in-house, is that I have heard at least one other IT consultant relate to me how one of his client's outsourced email solution disappeared overnight when the hosted services company shut its doors. Left them high and dry and without critical assets and services, not to mention orders and inquiries and service requests from his client company's own clients.
Bottom line is that if email is critical to a company's survival, it isn't any more costly to do it in-house if you're smart and do business with an ethical company or individual who will set you up right in the first place than it is to host remotely with a hosting company. Up front costs may be higher, but long term costs can actually be lower in my experience. With server costs going down, bandwidth increasing, better storage and backup, spam solutions getting better and easier to use---the need for remote hosting is actually, in my opinion, going down. If email is that critical in any case, then isn't it worth a small extra cost to ensure you don't suffer avoidable misfortunes created by a host?
I will admit that it is often a simple solution, speedy, and easy to set up a remotely hosted email solution. I also realize there ARE some reputable companies out there that have incredible service (Rackspace stands out) and I would trust with my email solution. But not all of them are cheap, either.
For the small business with their own in-house IT employee, it is in my opinion always better to go in-house. Among the reasons is that I think it definitely is more cost effective in that case, allows more options, in all cases avoids those inevitable costly 'one-time service ticket' charges that seem to be a necessity with hosted companies and always somehow crop up...even when the problem lies on their end. There are other benefits as well that aren't often considered, older servers can be recycled to other uses---such as filling less critical roles, be configured to serve as NAS, or be configured as a redundant backup, or sold off to further reduce new acquisition costs.
In the end, price point aside, I would tell a client that if they can afford to go 24-72 hours without email, then a hosted solution is suitable. If not, go in-house. At least that way, the biggest problem you have to deal with is your cable company or T1 or DSL provider losing service. And that's probably less than the odds that a hosting company will go out of business, screw up your account, have their own outage, or upgrade servers and end up making something incompatible with something else which leads to server outages while they do a dance and feed you a line about 'technical difficulties'---when the only difficulties are that their staff didn't take the proper precautions before migrating or upgrading or because they don't understand simple audit procedures.
Contrasted with the time it takes to set up a spanking new server environment and then duplicate a spare hard drive to set aside for worst case scenarios, my criteria must next jump to what the value of the emails amounts to. If daily you have emails bringing you hundreds or thousands of dollars of business, then, by all means splurge for a hosted solution with a reputable company. On the other hand, if they are primarily just communications between customers and employees, a webhosting account probably comes with an email solution suitable for that. No need for a special email solution if you already have a hosting account or if your ISP offers basic email. If you host your own site, and your email is non-critical, again, you can manage your own solution easy enough.
Bottom line, if your emails volume is extremely high or is a source of direct income/conversion, consider remotely hosted. Otherwise, I think it is still more reliable and cost effective to do it in-house.
Just my two cents worth...
On the other hand, when I refer to the scenario where emails are responsible for direct income/conversion and suggest hosted solutions as viable, I am referring to a higher cost, more reliable remotely hosted email service than the overwhelming majority being offered--in other words, something above the $30-40/month price point that another poster mentioned. (And there are only perhaps 3 or 4 companies I feel that have the service and infrastructure to do it right.)
We've had a really good experience with this sort of thing. If there are changes to DNS, or policy, we have been notified well in advanced. Generally we have gone with mid-sized ISP's so we get that personal touch when setting everything up, but they are not so small that they are incompetent.
If the client is worried about maintaining backups of their email, most hosting companies will provide some kind of archiving service and send you a backup of all the email once a week or so (in addition to the backups they are running in-house).
I think if you are willing to pay for a consultant to be on-site within 24 hours of a problem, then maybe you can get more reliable service, but generally an ISP is in a lot of trouble if their services are down for more than a couple hours. If you go with the company providing your Internet connectivity and there is an outage, well, there would have been one if you were hosting your email on site too in most cases. Also, again, I think to get a better quality of service, if you have no in house technical people (and there really are companies who don't have a single person who could read well-written technical documentation and understand it), that you will end up spending more money on external support and hardware updates than need be.
It used to be that you could easily run your email on an old computer or desktop, and this would be cost effective, a good re-use of your resources, and so on. These days, from what I have seen, at least 90% of all email that hits a server is garbage. To reject all the invalid email, scan it all for spam and viruses, and then deliver the correct email takes a lot more processing power these days than it used to.
For example, on a mail server that handles email for only 120 users, approximately 19,922 messages on an example day get scanned by the mail server (this is not counting all of the messages that are rejected because of being an invalid user, etc). Of those, at least 17,086 are definately spam. Another 164 contain viruses. That is just what the system catches, as spam still gets through. If we enable greylisting, the number of messages the system ends up having to scan is halved, but this introduces various other issues. And we're still not thinking about all the other email that never makes it to this point, because it is not addressed correctly.
So to run your email in house, you do have to invest in quality hardware. It is also likely that you need to invest in a more reliable network connection. Keep in mind, you often have to pay ISP's extra for them to allow you to host email on their network (Many ISP's do not allow SMTP servers to exist on their network by default.) And then you have to pay someone to help you with support, updates, backup solutions, and disaster assistance.
I do think a good point is brought up about host quality. Obviously, if you go by some fly-by-night cheap hosting company, based somewhere far away from you, you will likely have lots of problems.
Also if you do keep your email in-house, you will do well if you purchase an email server solution, as opposed to having one that is cobbled together by some consultant. The consultant can help you install and customize the solution still, of course. This way, you can probably get some support from the company selling the email server solutions, and updates will be much easier, especially if you need to change consultants for some reason. The same applies when it comes to hardware. Make sure that your hardware is backed by warranties, to help avoid needless delays if something breaks. Spending a few extra dollars on quality goes a long way toward keeping things stable.