You are currently viewing Is Your Business Still Using Gmail? Here’s Why You Need to Upgrade to a Professional Email

Is Your Business Still Using Gmail? Here’s Why You Need to Upgrade to a Professional Email

What is an email hosting service?

Email hosting is a service in which an email hosting provider rents out email servers to its users.

Email hosting is not the same as domain hosting or website hosting. You may first check out our article which explains the difference between domain hosting, website hosting and email hosting. Some service providers, for instance, MailSafi, offer all of these services, and you do not have to worry about signing up for each of these services with different service providers.

While there are some free email services, there are downsides to using these for business. We discuss a few of these downsides below.

The Downside of using Free Email Services for Business

Some of the most common free email services are @gmail, @yahoo, @hotmail, to name a few. The best thing about these services is that they are absolutely free (well, at least in monetary terms!). No commitment. No contract. You can join any time and close your account any time.

Unfortunately, these email services are not recommended for business use for several reasons. These include:-

• Because the email is not customized to your business, most visitors will doubt your authenticity.

• While they may have sufficient storage space to meet the needs of small businesses, for larger or heavier users, storage becomes limited, making it necessary to delete emails to continue using the service.

• Most have annoying advertisements.

• Untimely customer support and limited contact options.

There are email services specifically developed and structured with businesses and professionals in mind – not for personal use. We discuss the benefits of these below.

Benefits of Choosing a Professional Email Hosting Service

While there are free versions of email hosting available, email hosting companies offer professional email hosting services which allow you to have your own custom domain email. Professional email hosting has proven to be more reliable than free versions of email available on the web. They allow you to have your custom domain name, i.e., peter@kachooks.com, instead of peter@gmail.com or peter@yahoo.com. These free email services undoubtedly have their place – they are more appropriate for personal communication than business.

Email hosting companies host and manage your incoming and outgoing email on a separate shared or dedicated mail server. When done right, email hosting can revolutionize a business by offering a system to manage your emails well. With professional email hosting plans, you can also get additional tools to aid your email marketing campaigns.

Here are some benefits of choosing a professional email hosting company for an email hosting solution for your business over a free email service:

1. Yes, first impressions count! A custom email address may seem like a drop in the ocean when it comes to branding your business, but it’s irrefutably essential. You can make a meaningful impact on your clients, shareholders, suppliers or partners in just one glance. A custom domain email address gives your business legitimacy.

2. A custom domain email @yourcompanyname shows more credibility and professionalism than using any other free email service that cannot customize your domain. Most free email companies offer basic email, but you must use their domain (for instance, @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com @freemail.com). Such domain names no longer project a professional tone for businesses and do not inspire confidence in potential clients, shareholders, suppliers or partners. They’re often associated with spammers or fraudsters.

3. Professional email services offer more storage space for email, and you don’t have to worry about continuously deleting emails to create more space.

4. Unlike with free email services, with professional email hosting, you have access to your email service provider to call/email for help if anything goes wrong.

5. Most email hosting services will maintain and support our email for you. This is not only cheaper in the long run but will free up your IT teams to focus on other core business matters.

Continuously monitoring, maintaining and supporting the company’s email yourself or in-house will add to your expenses and increase the likelihood of computer infections resulting from viruses, malware, and increased risks of blacklisting, ransomware, phishing and spoofing attacks. Such problems may cause email downtime lasting several hours or days.

The best email hosting providers invest in infrastructure and resources to ensure redundancy should the primary mail server go down. They have tools to monitor systems and IT experts responsible for regularly updating email security systems (spam filtering).

6. Some of the best professional email hosting providers in the market today (e.g., MailSafi, Google, Microsoft) will also offer team collaboration tools.

7. Unlike ad-endorsed free email, domain email is free of ads and includes advanced email management solutions and creation features.

8. Having your domain email (@yourdomain) tends to be safer and a lesser target for cybercriminals compared to, for instance, @gmail.com or @yahoo.com

9. Some business email hosting services come with additional features such as calendar, address book, tasks, notes, larger attachments.

What is Hosted Email?

As an example, MailSafi offers free email hosting with our web hosting packages. This is called shared hosting. However, this is an entry-level (shared hosting) service and does not offer the same benefits as our professional email service, a fully-managed email service. Read more reasons why hosting your email on a shared website server isn’t such a great idea if you rely heavily on email for your business. Here’s an article with more information on the difference between fully-managed email hosting and shared hosting.

Over the past few years, many businesses have moved away from shared hosting and embraced the benefits of fully-managed email hosting services – often referred to as cloud email hosting. See here a detailed discussion on the 7 Benefits of Cloud Email Hosting for Business.

The Best Email Hosting Services

As discussed, free email hosting is not the best choice for businesses that rely heavily on email for operations. Free and shared email hosting platforms don’t always deliver the kind of quality that professional users need. Professional business email hosting services are most likely to fit the needs of a growing business better.

To deliver the best possible email experience, professional email services include additional features such as:

• A customized domain name that helps in building your business’ brand.

• More storage space.

• Easier to scalable. With most professional email hosting services, you can add and remove users as your business needs change. This means you will only pay for what you need.

• More robust antivirus and email spam filters reducing the chances that your organization will be blacklisted on the internet.

• Email uptime guarantee is higher with professional email hosting than shared website hosting which suffers more likelihood of downtime.

• No advertisements.

• Some of the best business email hosting service providers have the added advantage of (optional) team collaboration tools. Collaboration tools make team work in organizations easier – read our article on the benefits of digital collaboration in the workplace to get a better understanding of how they can improve communication in your business.

• Email synchronization across multiple devices, through webmail, smartphone and your favorite email client (such as Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.)

• Using a third-party email hosting company allows you to reduce your email management costs. Because maintenance and other updates are handled by your email service provider, you’ll need fewer internal management resources (time, personnel, hardware, software, etc.). There is no need to hire a range of specialized IT staff dedicated to managing and maintaining internal email servers.

• Larger attachments.

• IMAP/POP3/Exchange active sync services.

MailSafi: First-Class Email Hosting for Business

Today, many businesses rely heavily on email for communication between staff, with clients, suppliers, shareholders and partners. If your business falls in this category of “heavily reliant on email”, cloud email hosting is more suitable for you than managing your own in-house email server or relying on shared hosting. Further, free email services such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail will not do much for your credibility or branding. MailSafi Email Hosting comes in three plans: Basic, Business and Enterprise.

Benefits and Features of MailSafi Email Hosting Service

✓ Guaranteed availability 99.99% uptime

✓ Email access anytime, anywhere on multiple devices via a desktop computer, laptop, phone or other mobile device. MailSafi keeps you continuously in the loop while you’re on the go.

✓ Filtering of spam, viruses and malware. Protection against email spoofing, ransomware and phishing attacks. Includes both inbound and outbound email scanning – minimizing the risk that your organization will be blacklisted on the internet.

✓ No additional hardware or software is required on your part.

✓ Storage space starting from 10GB (Basic) up to 50 GB (Enterprise). Extra storage space available on-demand and at a minimal fee.

✓ Flexible storage space allocation – pooled storage or per user storage

✓ MailSafi has multiple email servers located in different geographical locations for redundancy. Guaranteed 99.9% uptime.

✓ Email hosting for multiple domains.

✓ Calendar for scheduling appointments. You can synchronize, schedule and share your appointments with others in your organization automatically

✓ Address book to allow storage and sharing of contacts within the organization.

✓ IMAP/POP/Exchange Active Sync

✓ Administrator portal to manage users – create, delete users, etc.

✓ Users can manage their mailbox settings, including changing passwords, enabling two-factor authentication, setting application-specific passwords, enabling out-of-office, filtering email by folders and creating multiple user identities.

✓ You can access your email via a web browser or on any third-party email client (e.g., Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.)

✓ Incoming and outgoing email encryption in transit using TLS encryption.

✓ 24 * 7 technical support

✓ MailSafi is flexible to accommodate the varying user needs in an organization. We are prepared to discuss further with you the specific needs of your users to provide a reliable and affordable solution that works for you, even if it means splitting your users between the three plans as is necessary. You will only spend on what you need.

Team collaboration features – file storage, file sharing, file sync, collaborate on files, video call/chat online with your colleagues is available in the Enterprise plan.

To start using MailSafi Cloud Email Hosting is as easy as signing up to our website and changing MX DNS records for your domain to point to our servers. You can then access your email on your browser or configure to access via an email client such as Outlook, Thunderbird or Lotus.

To get more information on our email hosting service or schedule a demo or meeting, get in touch with us today!

Zacharia Kimotho

Zacharia is a passionate SEO expert and content marketer who works at Kaluari Limited, a leading company in the field of Cloud and Email Hosting Solutions. He has been writing and sharing his insights on various topics related to AI, IT, and marketing for over five years. He loves to explore the latest trends and innovations in these domains and how they can benefit businesses and society. He also enjoys learning new skills and tools to enhance his online presence and reach.

This Post Has One Comment

Comments are closed.