5 Best Email Hosting for Small Business in

5 Best Email Hosting for Small Business in 2020

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Summary: In this article, I will highlight the best third-party email hosting for small business & medium sized business website. These email hosting solutions for SMBs are scalable and allow you to send as many emails to your customers without the fear of getting blocked or landing in the spam folder.

It is no surprise that email is still the most effective marketing tool for any business. Last year, 43% of businesses considered email marketing as one of the best ways to market their products and services.

Ecommerce stores, online banks, forex, paid adverts, and user verification, all processes require valid email addresses to work smoothly for a business.  Even a second’s delay in sending emails can lead to problems for most businesses. And if you are in the digital business you must know that customers start to panic when they don’t get business emails on time.

A survey by Litmus, an email marketing company, ranked email marketing service problems as the third most important challenge that businesses face today regarding email marketing challenges.

Email Stats

What is Email Hosting and Why Use It?

An email hosting service is the one that runs an email server. You can get an email hosting server by signing up to the email hosting service. All you need is a domain name to use an email service. You can use an email hosting server to manage, send, and maintain your email accounts. Most of the large ecommerce stores have in-house email servers to  ensure that the emails reach the recipients on time. However, the small businesses use email hosting solutions provided by companies like Google, Zoho, Rackspace, and many others.
Recently, most website hosting services have started offering email hosting servers as an add-on with their regular services such as shared, dedicated, and cloud hosting. Cloudways is one of them. It offers managed cloud hosting services with an email hosting solution by Rackspace.

Types of Email Hosting for Small Business

There are many different types of  email hosting solutions, each serving a different purpose. Let’s check out  what type of email hosting service will work best for your business.

1. Shared Web Hosting With Email Service

This type of email service is available with a shared hosting service. You can’t use it for sending/receiving bulk emails due to limitations on the email server.

2. Third-Party Email Hosting

Most digital businesses prefer to use third-party email hosting solutions. These are scalable, easy-to-use email servers that provide excellent support. Do remember that  you will have to pay separately for email hosting service. Therefore, the cost will be more than what you will pay if you get a shared web hosting with email service.

3. Self-Hosted Email Servers

These are complex email servers that are robust, and require technical expertise on part of the team operating these servers. These servers are reliable, and you can send, receive, and maintain emails with ease.

Why Should You Host Email on a Separate Server

Many experts recommend that the email should not be hosted on the same server that hosts the web files (and the database) of your business websites. This is an easy to make mistake as many businesses see a separate email server as an “avoidable” business expense and thus host the email on the same server. When disaster strikes and the server goes down for any reason,  the business couldn’t even email the providers because the email system also went offline.

From a technical perspective, hosting the email is a bad idea. web hosting and email hosting are two very different components with different resource requirements. hosting them on the same server could cause a competition over the resources that could potentially drag down the application performance.

Finally, there is the tricky question of support. While the support team of the provider might be very well versed in dealing with teh web hosting issues, their grasp on troubleshooting email hosting could be sketchy.

IMAP vs POP3 vs SMTP – Comparing Email Protocols

Let’s learn the difference between the email sending protocols. Here is the list of protocols that you will need to send emails.

i. IMAP

It is called the  Internet Access Message Protocol. It deals with retrieving email messages and managing them on the server. You can’t  use the IMAP protocol to send emails. Instead, you can use it to receive email messages and keep them on the server.

ii. SMTP

The  SMTP protocol stands for (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). It is the industry-standard protocol for sending emails. SMTP allows you to send email messages, relay them, or forward them to other mail clients such as from Microsoft Outlook to Gmail. When you send emails, you can  use the SMTP server to carry out the transmission process.

iv. POP3

POP3 is an email protocol that lets you receive email messages and downloads them to your server. It has the same functionality as IMAP protocol but it doesn’t keep these email messages on the server. Instead, it downloads them from the email server to the user’s computer and deletes the server copy.

On the other hand, IMAP protocol stores the email message on the email server and synchronizes the email across multiple devices.

Q. Should You Use POP3 or IMAP? 

It depends on how you want to receive the emails. Most email service providers usually offer both functionalities. However, it is better if you choose IMAP protocol because your emails will stay on the server and you can access them anytime. If you use the POP3 email protocol, all emails will be downloaded to your personal computer and you won’t be able to use them.

Cloudways User Choice: Email Hosting Services [POLL]

We had conducted a poll to find out what type of email hosting service works best for businesses around the globe. The results weren’t what we had predicted.

 Cloudways Poll - User Choice Email Hosting for Small Busiess & Medium Business

Source: Cloudways Users Group

Which Business Email Hosting Provider Is Best? Features, Prices, & Limitations

Check out the following comparison table for email hosting for small business.

Feature G Suite Cloudways Rackspace Add-on Zoho Office 365 Outlook Yandex
Custom Domains Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
24/7 Support Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Spam Filtering Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Price Starts From $6 $2 $40 $100 $3
Email Limit 10000 10000 1000 10000 500
Attachment Limit 25MB 50MB 100MB 100MB 30MB
Minimum # of Accounts 1 1 1 5 3
Maximum # of Accounts 300 10000 1000 10000 1000
Desktop App Windows, macOS, Linux N/A Windows, macOS, Linux Windows, macOS, Linux N/A
Mobile App iOS, Android iOS, Android iOS, Android iOS, Android iOS, Android

 

How Cloudways Helps you Set Up Email Hosting?

Cloudways offers an email hosting and management add-on. With  this addon, you get your email inboxes from the Rackspace email hosting solution. It covers everything you need to create your email server for any website. The service is swift, offers robust support, and is available 24×7. With Cloudways Rackspace email hosting service add-on you get both SMTP and IMAP protocols.

You can also use Gmail SMTP add-on with Cloudways to send 99 emails each day with automated SMTP delivery. The service allows you to add your multiple SMTP accounts, i.e. Mandrill account, Mailgun account, AuthSMTP account, or other Custom SMTPs. If you want to get the Gmail SMTP service, you can read about the activation process. It is completely hassle-free.

With both Cloudways email hosting add-ons you get:

  • Guaranteed Uptime
  • Privacy & Protection
  • Easy  Installation
  • Round the Clock Support
  • Fully Secured Environment

Cloudways Email Hosting Solution Price

The best part? You can get the most reliable and the fastest email hosting service offered by Cloudways managed hosting platform for as low as $1 per mailbox per month.

Best Email Hosting Services for Small Business

Check out the list of best email hosting for small business you can use to boost your email campaigns.

1. G Suite Gmail

First on our list is G-Suite. We all know how Gmail works. Think of GSuite as an advanced, more sophisticated, and a  feature-rich version of Gmail. . G Suite is a set of Google cloud-based applications that allow you to simplify many of your tasks. It  includes Calendar, Hangout, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Sites, and more.

It is one of the most popular email services available with over a billion active users. Moreover, you can use multiple third-party applications on G Suite to enhance your productivity for no extra charges.  Do remember that G Suite is not free and you will have to pay a nominal fee for using GSuite applications. The prices start from as low as $6 per user per month for basic and go up to $25 per user per month for the enterprise version. With GSuite, each user gets 30GB storage space shared across Google apps including Gmail, Drive, Photos, and Docs. G Suite Enterprise users get a storage space of 1TB.

2. Cloudways Rackspace Email Hosting

Rackspace offers business-class email hosting service for small businesses. It is perfect for users who are looking for reliable email servers that can handle their email campaigns. Rackspace uses Outlook and Rackspace email service for email hosting. The prices of both services may vary.

The best thing  about Rackspace is that you can use it as an add-on with your Cloudways managed hosting service. With Rackspace, you get email filtering options to keep your inbox spam and junk-free. Moreover, Rackspace guarantees that it won’t sell user data. It complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). With Rackspace, you get 24/7/365 chat service, ticketing system, and in-phone support. You also get 25GB email storage with all Rackspace email plans. The basic plan starts with $2.99 per user per month.

Here’s How to Setup Rackspace Email Add-on

3. Zoho Mail

Zoho mail service is an alternative to G Suite and Microsoft Office 365 business email. It offers almost the same features including hosted emails, office suite, and other tools for work. Zoho offers a free and a paid version of the mail service. The free service offers  basic features such as a web-based client to send and receive emails. With the free version, you can neither set up a business account, nor can you get a custom domain service. On the other hand, with the paid version of the Zoho mail service, you can easily set up a custom domain name for your emails. It also supports POP/IMAP/email forwarding service.  You can check your email using a third-party app. Zoho Mail is an affordable option for new businesses as its basic plan starts with a $12 per year price tag, with 5GB email storage. Higher plans of Zoho mail offer 30GB storage per user, and features like Zoho Docs cloud storage, and Zoho Office Suite.

Here’s a Guide on Setting up Zoho Mail

4. Office 365 Outlook

If you are a Microsoft user, the Microsoft Office Suite 365 is the best option available to you. The Office 365 service offers a bundle of all necessary tools including Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You will also get the Office 365 Business Premium for your email hosting account. The service is available with a custom domain name. The Office 365 Business Premium service offers  50GB space and uses the custom domain name for an email address. With the Office 365 Outlook version, you will get Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Access, and Publisher (for PC only) applications to enhance your productivity. Moreover, you will get a 1TB OneDrive cloud storage to store your files. Office 365 Outlook costs $100 per year.

5. Yandex Mail

Yandex is a Russian search engine that also provides an email hosting service. It  is perfect for all those who want to set up an email hosting server with a custom domain name. It  is not only fast, flexible, but also cheaper than other service providers available. You will get a paid account for as low as $3 per month. For a website, you can have three  email users, however, if you are signing up as an organization, you can get 1,000 free accounts. Yandex offers free unlimited storage for all email accounts. Moreover, you can connect with Yandex Mail and Yandex. You will also  get collaboration tools, including, track issues, wiki, calendar, forms, messenger, and cloud disk. With Yandex, each user has 10GB of online storage space per year. It has anti-virus and anti-spam technologies to protect your mailbox and comes with two-factor authentication (2FA) for stronger login security and migration.

The FAQs for Choosing the Best Email Hosting Service

Should You Use a Separate Server for Email Hosting?

It depends. If you are using a service that offers email hosting servers  then that is an advantage for you. Cloudways offers email hosting service as an add-on so you don’t have to use another service. All the charges will be deducted from your Cloudways hosting account. On the other hand, if you are using a hosting server that doesn’t offer email hosting, then you will need a separate hosting server for sending and receiving emails. You can use G Suite or Microsoft Office 365 depending on your requirements.

What bandwidth server to get for small business email hosting?

For sending emails, you are renting out space from email servers on which SMTP and IMAP email interfaces are installed. The email hosting servers manage incoming and outgoing emails. Though bandwidth doesn’t usually matter when buying email hosting space unless you are sending emails in bulk. If you are sending less than 10,000 emails per day, then the Cloudways Rackspace email hosting, G Suite, and Microsoft Office 365 service will serve you well.

What’s the essential software for email hosting service?

You will need to have SMTP, IMAP, and POP3 protocols available on your email hosting server so that you can send and receive emails easily.  Most of the email hosting providers like Cloudways Rackspace email hosting, G Suite, and Office 365 offer many other features such as slides, docs, sheets, hangouts, and presentations.

Conclusion

This brings us to the end of this article. That’s all you need to know about the best email hosting for small business & medium sized businesses. Email marketing has now become an integral part of every digital business. If you want to scale your business, this is the right time to get an email hosting service for your business. A good email hosting service will help you scale, enhance support, and get more customers through new marketing channels.

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Sajjad Shahid

Sajjad is an Ecommerce Community Manager at Cloudways. He loves helping out Ecommerce store owners, merchants and marketers in establishing their businesses and startups. Sajjad enjoys playing table tennis and cricket over the weekend.

Keep reading the article at The Official Cloudways Blog. The article was originally written by Sajjad Shahid on 2020-03-06 06:09:49.

The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are "affiliate links." This means if you click on the link and purchase the product, We may receive an affiliate commission.

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