What features to look for in email solutions for small business

Email Hosting Services

A smart and efficient email hosting solutions are essentially one of the most significant modes of communication for any small or medium sized businesses. In the 21st century, information exchange through an email is one of the most widespread forms of communication, with footprints in arguably all domains of information technology, retail and finance sectors. Hence, establishing a cheap, easy to use, reliable and quick email hosting service is nothing but the need of an hour for any small sized enterprise. Maintaining a hosted business emailing system has its perks and benefits, which explains its surging popularity across the globe.

Introduction to email hosting solutions
A great deal of research should be done for creating the basic structure of dedicated email servers, for which the needs and requirements must be carefully analysed. There are a number of email hosting service providers operating in the market, which sometimes put customers in a state of fix for choosing the perfect and pocket friendly option. Hence, it is advisable to get a price quote from different email hosting solution providers, so as to make an intelligent comparison between them.

Check list for online email solutions
The small sided businesses must carefully evaluate the offered email solutions package and make sure that any frivolous or unnecessary paid services are not the part of deal. At present, the email hosting services are gaining popularity, owing to the much fawned upon highly secure and easy to use POP and IMAP access that they provide as additional features. These types of hosting solutions offer POP and IMAP services for internal emailing needs within a secure network (usually an organisation's privately owned intranet). Special dedicated email servers take control of both internal and external online communications. Further, the data traffic is usually transferred over a secure encrypted mode, which ensures that any sensitive or highly confidential information is not accessible to the unwanted users and remains available to just the target clientele and server.

One must make sure that a dedicated online email hosting service offers inbuilt protection from spamming and viruses, besides making sure that any unwanted user cannot gain access in the system. Spamming and virus attacks are some of the several problems in email communication at the moment, which underlines the fact that its protection is indispensable. A network support technician can configure the email servers so as to filter out any unwanted spam and viruses from the network and only genuine mails enter the user's inbox. Further, one must make sure that the data storage offered in the email hosting package should be as per the requirement, since both insufficient and excess space will not be cost effective, especially in the case of small businesses.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/what-features-to-look-for-in-email-solutions-for-small-business-6479426.html

What features you should look for in an email hosting solution?

Like many business criteria’s, making a decision on which email hosting company to select could prove tough. With many web hosting companies offering unlimited resources and maximum uptime, it becomes difficult for enterprises make a proper decision. Most reputable email server hosting programs offer service guarantees that give the hosting firm incentive to keep their servers running all time. With a lot of competition out there for hosting businesses it is important to make a wise decision before opting for one. The following article highlights the important areas in evaluating a good web host.

The key features in identifying a web host are:

1. Uptime: A reliable email solutions provider will have an uptime of over 99.5 percent.

• It is advisable to select a host that offers a refund or a discount in an event if their services below percentage.

2. Price: Pricing is the key aspect when selecting web hosting provider.

• Jumping on the cheapest offer should be avoided.
• Quality hardware and non-outsources support cost quite a bit and a hosting company offering services at cheaper price will most likely not include the two above mentioned features.  

3. Bandwidth: A good email hosting services provider offers unlimited bandwidth. Hosting companies should be able to provide clients with speed validation and performance claims.

4. Technical Support: Technical support is generally provided 24/7. Just like the connectivity speed, response speed should also be equally competent.

The different kinds of technical support offered by a hosting company include email, chat and toll-free phone.

5.     Database Support: Businesses should be sure about the type of database they are comfortable with. Most hosting companies offer MySQL, SQL server, and Oracle.

6.     Stability: Stability is a key factor in a reliable email server hosting service provider.

• A business should ensure that the host will stick around for many years.
• Selecting a host that has done better business in the past would prove a reliable choice.
• Business should work with the hosting company directly and not through a reseller.
• Check for the track record and level of service of the host before opting one.

7.     Control Panel: A good host will allow a business to manage the different  aspects of its web account.

• A business will be able to add, delete and manage its email address and change passwords. 
• A hosting company will ensure proper maintenance of the email accounts of clients.

8.     Number of Domains and Subdomains: Organizations may require two or even three domains for various purposes. Before opting for a web host, ensure that the host accommodates more domains.

9.     Add-ons: Most email solutions provider offers additional features to show them more attractive. Some of the additional features include:

• Multiple data centers
• Energy saving practices
• Free domain privacy
• Regular data backups to name a few

10.   Scalability: A good hosting company should draw adequate traffic to a business site.
As businesses eye their own growth, the above mentioned factors will help in deciding a suitable web host.

How is email archival solution beneficial for my business?

Email Solutions

Over the past decade, electronic mail or email has become an inevitable part of the business workflow. Everything of an enterprise’s business survives somewhere in the email. The growth of email has raised concerns pertaining to security and storage of data and further, businesses are under obligation to maintain email records for years together. Today, a large number of business organizations are opting for email archival solutions to address issues such as legal and storage management issues. More businesses are now using archiving for disaster recovery and for monitoring employee communication. The following article explores the benefits archival email hosting and why it is important for organizations.

Benefits of Archiving Email:
There are many reasons to why an enterprise archives email messages. The reason could range from regulatory compliance to business benefits, from litigation support to knowledge management.

Compliance: The major drivers behind the increasing demand for email archiving are the various state and federal regulations.

• Some of the regulatory acts include the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), Gramm-Leach Bliley Act (GLBA), and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
• Today, more than 10,000 regulations exist in the world.
• Businesses are compelled to retain their email records like any other corporate records.
• Failing to keep with the regulations, a business could face severe penalties including enormous fines or even criminal charges.
• For example, in 2006, Morgan Stanley, a leading global financial services provider, was fined $15 million for failing to produce emails to the Securities and Exchange Commission and for misleading the SEC investigators.
• With a regulated archiving system in place, emails can be checked for compliance and retained for a long time based on the email content.
• These regulations reduce the risk of exchanging inappropriate content.

Litigation: Litigation process involves data retrieval for issues such as human resource concerns, regulatory compliance, and client correspondence validation to name a few.

• An enterprise that fails to submit the requested information can be found guilty of spoiling data.
• According to a recent data, nearly 66 percent of IT companies have referred email archives to support their firms in legal cases.
• In addition, 63 percent of IT companies have been ordered to produce employee emails by a regulatory body.
• Storage and Optimization: Email archiving provides an effective and permanent solution to email messages while clearing up resources on important servers.

Backup and Disaster Recovery: Loss in large volumes of emails is a business disaster. To protect against severe loss of email, email archival solutions enable enterprises to restore their email systems.

Storage Management: Storage management has always been a major issue with organizations.

• Corporate email traffic doubled between 2005 and 2009, messages increased from 65 billion to 120 billion.
• An archiving system automatically offloads data and improves server efficiency.

Knowledge Management: Vital content of an employee is maintained even when the employee leaves the firm.

Email hosting solutions have become the best record keeping format for electronic communication which organizations now find invaluable.

Mobile Email Will Overtake Webmail And Desktop Email

Webmail Hosting

Studies indicate that mobile email will overtake webmail and desktop email by June 2012. As compared to webmail clients and the desktop computer, it is indicated that mobile devices will be used extensively for reading emails. A lot of people are also are already making extensive use of ipads to view emails.

This is due to the surge in usage of mobile devices. The number of people using the Smartphone has tripled. It has been found that an approximate 87% of people use their mobiles daily to check emails. This is just an indication for email providers, manufacturers of mobile phones, the Smartphone and ipads that the brands created by them should be optimized well for viewing emails on mobiles.

Optimizing Mobile Presence
In fact the web presence of the mobile should be optimized extensively as stated by the experts. Optimization of websites will help greatly to view the websites with great ease on mobile devices and it is commonplace understanding that if this does not happen they will not want to visit the website!

The operating systems for mobiles and the browsers unfortunately prove to be detrimental for the brands to make any kind of investments right away. It becomes essential for the brands to maintain cognizant attitude about rendering effective webmail hosting, images as well as text on devices like mobile phones, the Smartphone and ipads.

Role Of Designers And Marketers
For profiles of different kinds and email messages being viewed on mobiles, the brands will also need to account for applications. To do this, adequate resources will be needed. Across platforms of different kinds, the websites and emails will need to be optimized by the email service providers. This needs to be kept in mind by marketers and designers who are already have extra burden of designing sites and emails.

Besides this, the marketers also have a lot work to do in this respect including optimizing email servers. The experts are of the belief that that the whole industry of mobile devices, needs to adopt standards. Extensive collaboration will be needed by a number of platform providers including Microsoft, Apple and Google and many others.

Push From Certain Organizations
Amongst many of these companies there already exists power play. However for creating one of the best standards a lot of effort will be put in by the marketers, as stated by experts. Some push has been offered by organizations like DMA and the EEC or the Email Experience Council. A lot is being expected the world over.

In some of the elements of standardization, documents that are web based are visually presented in the Cascading Style Sheet new version called the CSS3. The mobile emailing uptake is already significantly in use by a number of noted brands since the past few months. With this in mind there are increased chances of the mobile email overtaking the desktop email and webmail, very soon.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/email-articles/mobile-email-will-overtake-webmail-and-desktop-email-6106428.html

Email Hosting-An Insight on Email Solutions

Email Hosting-An Insight on Email Solutions from Net4 India Ltd.

Hosted Mail for More Productivity for Your Business

Email Hosting

If you are looking towards increased productivity in business then you will need to have high quality hosted services. The Microsoft hosted exchange package offers one of the most unique experiences. Integration allowed is easy with complete Microsoft office product and Microsoft Outlook suites.

To ensure that tasks related to communication are much more efficient it provides the best of information and scheduling tools. Users can enjoy peace of mind with the regular backup of data provided, hands off operation and customer support 24x7.

Complete Data Protection
Adequate data protection is also offered on a regular basis. The Microsoft Hosted Exchange is basically more than an email hosting and helps in increasing productivity. If you have a business budget that is small then one of the best robust solutions in communication is offered by this email too in top quality corporate class.

Business owners these days are taking their businesses online and due to this a lot of popularity is being gained by services in web hosting. One of the most reliable and trustworthy services is VPS or Virtual Private Server hosting. Every business owner can make the most of this affordable solution.

Website and Application Compatibility 
Two software’s Open VZ and Xen are considered as most popular software applications in VPS. Multiple clients are able to share one single server with a VPS hosting plan. The independent VPS caters to the sites of their businesses solely. Software applications most needed for businesses can be installed, started and rebooted as desired by web masters in VPS web hosting.

As per choice, Linux, or Windows webmail hosting can be selected for business sites by clients. It is important to ensure website and application compatibility with the operating systems or you may not get to use them optimally as desired.

Isolated Server And Control Panel Available 
VPS of each client is independent from the rest of the clients who share physical resources of a similar kind.  This isolated server is an indicator about having no fear with respect to spam or web attacks which generally spread in a virtual environment by any neighbor.

CPanel and DirectAdmin are the control panels available for managing accounts in a set of a single web master with no need of logging in multiple times. With hosting in virtual servers the automated installers of scripts most used are Fantastico and Installatron.

Carefree Server Management 
RAID architecture and dual email server which is powerful are maintained best with the HVAC system for bringing in the required productivity over the VPS hosted websites. Without having to pay too much the clients are able to host domains in unlimited numbers with the hosting packages. Clients are offered web hosting services that are managed to remain carefree about management of servers.

Depending upon the type of VPS web hosting subscription made the web masters is allowed a 2500 GB bandwidth. For the sites generally business owners are allotted memory up to 4 GB. For any market niche that has been targeted, this allows higher returns and better performance. A lot of facilities like changing of host name and root password, complete language support, reverse DNS setup, set up of main IP, managed backup, VNC and serial console access are part of each VPS web hosting.

How to Setup a Secure Mail Server?

Email Hosting

Your mail server Internet Protocol could get added to the blacklist if incorrect setting up of DNS is done. If on the spam blacklist you are listed, then all the inbound mail to come, gets blocked when secure mail server is given to the email servers, these days.

If DNS records have to be reversed to the business email server then the MX will have to be configured correctly and this very same principle can be followed for a messaging server of every kind. For the mail servers, to the private address internally, a static IP address has to be set up externally which is the first thing that needs to be assigned for email hosting.

Check the Outgoing NAT Rule
These rules will need to be applied on the firewall so that SMTP or Port 5 can be port forwarded besides which even an external IP address that is NAT is also port forwarded to the server’s internal address. One thing that is generally forgotten by many of the administrators is doing or checking if the NAT rule that is outgoing is set to use the very same IP address created externally for the inbound rule to the webmail server.

When this setting is not done then the reverse DNS does not match and in turn blacklisting of your email server is done on the list. When setting up of the firewall rules is done correctly the listed IP address on the page should be very similar to the IP address that has been mapped to the email server’s private IP address that is set up internally.

Need For an Administrative Contact for Making Changes
What do you have to do if for your business email server MX records have to be created? For your DNS provider for the domain there will need an administrative contact for making the changes. Via a control panel on the internet through a provider for DNS this can be done. If this is not done then the changes will have to be made via email or the phone.

A record for pointing the IP address that is mapped externally is first created on the webmail server’s firewall, called the mail. To point the A record created for the email service, an MX record can now be created. Now ‘add MX record’ will have to be selected in the DNS control server and as A record now set the FQDN but make sure that the lowest property is preferred.

Check Whether the MX and DNS Records Have Been Applied
The next thing to do is checking whether the MX and DNS records have been applied and for this you will have to use NS look up. Next the reverse DNS will have to be configured and then verified. An SMTP Banner will be shown each time a connection is established by the external email server with your server for email hosting.

It is important for the banner to be resolvable on the internet and hence to have it as an A record mail host is the best practice. Accordingly the SMTP Banner Exchange can be configured. Once this is done you will need to check if on the spam list or on in an open relay, the secure mail server is listed or not.

What Are The Benefits Of Business Emails Hosting?

Email Solutions

Author: Jass Sawhney
The way people buy and sell have changed so drastically in the past few years. The ones who succeed are those who are able to anticipate change and adapt according to that change. Those who are not receptive to change find that they are left behind. Communications that are fast and timely are of utmost importance to business ventures so that they remain in touch with suppliers and customers. Online businesses require email solutions that take care of many of their communication issues.

Benefits of Email MarketingHow can business establishments go looking for email business consultants? What should they be looking for? Looking for professional help with business emails is not drastically different from any other professional consultancy scouting. What a person wants would be consultants that don't cost a fortune, are on call when you want them, have a range of services, has a clean record of work and references and are trustworthy with information.

Chose one On The Same WavelengthIt helps if the consultancy that you are taking on is familiar with the business you do. Each business is special in its own way and the conventions are different. If you deal in food products and you enter into a contract with a company that provides email solutions for marketing mainly for books, you are bound to encounter problems. Foodstuffs are highly perishable whereas books are not and that is only a basic difference.

Another aspect to be kept in mind is the extent of email business marketing to be undertaken. If business emails are only one form of advertising undertaken, the extent and strategy will have to be carefully worked out. If these emails are the sole form of advertising, the strategy will be very different.

The customers who are being targeted also will influence the campaign. In developed countries, the clientele is homogenous whereas in a Third World country, the clientele will be varied. The level of education, the exposure to computers all matter. Email solutions cannot be one-size-fits-all variety.

Custom emails are the latest thing in email solutions. Professionals find it useful to advance themselves professionally, businesses find it great for expanding their customer base and ordinary people too find it helps to give them an identity. There are many consultants who can help you out.

Importance of AddressesThose who wish to get a personal email domain must check out the possibility of finding the email domain they desire. Next they should prospect for attractive services that are on offer. You can design your own email addresses. You can personalise it by reflecting your hobbies and interests in the address. A really unusual address will allow the clients remember the address. Exclusivity is always a good thing.

Your address should not in any way resemble a spam site. Authentic mass emailing cannot be tainted as being spam. Web hosts can distinguish between real mass emails and spam. Spam is unwanted whereas genuine emails are not. If these precautions are taken, you can make sure the emails will be welcomed.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/email-articles/what-are-the-benefits-of-business-emails-hosting-6044881.html

About the Author
Jass Sawhney specialises in writing for services in the IT sector. He has in-depth knowledge and experience in the field of web hosting, domain registration, cloud hosting, email hosting and VoIP services among others.