Email hosting is an investment for companies.
The resources that a good professional email server offers must meet the demands of online security, as well as the practicality of sending and receiving messages.
However, even with all the resources that professional email hosting offers, many companies – especially micro and small ones – still opt for the services of free servers.
What would be the best option for your company? Keep reading to find out!
Table of contents
What you need to know about free email hosting
Free hosting doesn’t allow you to work with your own domain. Can your company operate this way? Yes, but it will lose a lot in terms of credibility.
For example:
¿Con cuál de los dos preferiría hacer negocios?
Credibility is fundamental to the success of every business, and this is the premise of Email Validation, which not only generates leads, but also increases the deliverability and ROI of campaigns.
These results are only possible because Validation protects the sender’s reputation from mass emails by sanitizing the bases.
In other words, a list of valid emails does not present any risk of spam or bounces for the providers and, precisely because of this, has an excellent delivery capacity in the recipients’ inbox.
Another important point about free hosting is that your company cannot set sending and receiving rules.
In other words, in the free category, your company must comply with the server’s rules.
For example, if you need to delete sent emails, you’ll have to check whether the server offers this service.
Paid hosting services
In the paid email hosting system, the server is adapted to your company’s needs.
In other words, it’s a service that allows you to configure the sending and receiving of messages, and this makes a big difference, starting with Information Security.
For example, you can create your own spam filter, blocking certain domains and/or users.
In addition, a professional server provides advanced protection against Phishing scams, Ransomware, malware, among other types of cyber attacks that can access, steal or alter the information stored in your company’s databases.
It’s important to remember that a “simple” hacker attack can alter the header of your emails and change the identification of your company as the sender.
This means that if your server doesn’t offer adequate protection, someone could send thousands of emails in your company’s name.
Another interesting factor of paid hosting is the support, which should be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The data storage capacity offered by a professional server is also much greater.
This naturally meets the needs of any company. The more bandwidth, the better for sending and receiving emails.
How to choose a good email hosting service
Contrary to what many people think, email hosting does not necessarily have to be linked to website hosting.
This means that you can host your website on one server and have the email service managed on another that better meets your company’s needs.
That said, let’s take a look at the criteria for choosing a good email server:
- Security: does the platform offer SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication (used to protect senders from spam, viruses, scams, etc.)?
- Data: are there tracking reports so you can check for suspicious actions? This is a document that is available for the user to consult, with the aim of finding out where accounts are accessed from, as well as which emails have been sent and received.
- Is the control panel user-friendly? Any difficulty in identifying actions on the panel means an unintuitive platform, which is detrimental to account management.
- Does the service offer support for POP3, IMAP and SMTP hosting configurations, for integration with other email users (Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, etc.)?
- Do the support services meet the demands of mobile configuration?
- Does the hosting tool allow the creation of aliases and catch-all activation?
Aliases are emails created to forward only important messages to the main address. And catch-all is a feature that forwards emails with typos to the company address, but with the correct domain.
Conclusion
Email hosting is very important for business success because nowadays, messages are crucial as a communication channel between companies and customers. For this reason, choosing a good hosting service must be very careful.
FAQ
What risks does a free email server pose?
The fact that the company can’t run its emails under its own domain creates credibility problems. In addition, free hosting services do not allow you to configure sending and receiving rules. And there’s also the ‘Information Security’ factor, which is tied to the criteria provided by the server.
Why are paid email hosting services the most recommended for companies?
The company can send emails with its own domain, as well as having advanced security features at its disposal to prevent malware, scams and other problems related to hacker intrusions. The storage capacity of a paid server is much greater and support is available for configuration and/or account administration needs.
What details should you look for when choosing a good mail server?
Ease of navigation and good user experience through a user-friendly dashboard; availability of tracking reports to check for suspicious activity; SPF, DKIM and DMARC security authentications; support for hosting configurations, integrations and mobile; provision of aliases and catch-all.
