5 Reasons Why You Should Not Be Hosting Your Own Email | IPSYSTEMS, Inc.
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5 Reasons Why You Should Not Be Hosting Your Own Email

Should you or should you not be hosting your own email? It’s not as subjective a call as it might appear. There’s been a lot going on in politics and business to make this a viable option, especially since the Hillary Clinton email saga broke the internet a few years ago. But is there any reason to go contrary to this type of thinking? It turns out that there are probably more than a few.

5 Reasons You Should Outsource Your Email Hosting

1. Complexity

Email is the primary means of communication for many businesses, such that the volume of files and information exchanged via email is unfathomable. For a small fee, email providers can offer better scale and storage. By contrast, dedicated servers by small businesses only manage a small hard drive space.

Mail servers are complex. A typical instance comprises many software parts with unique functions. The configuration of each component ensures it plays nice with others to make a fully-functional mail server. The many complex moving parts raises the complexity of components and the set-up of a mail server.

Essential components in a mail server include:

  1. Mail Transfer Agent
  2. Mail Delivery Agent
  3. IMAP (or POP3 Server, or both)

Other components may include a spam filter, webmail, and an antivirus.

Mail servers require a domain name, correct DNS records, and an SSL certificate.

2. Time for Maintenance

Mail servers are notorious for needing continuous maintenance. Such may include keeping all critical components up to date. Your antivirus, spam filtering rules, and all three core components are at the top of this checklist.

Even with the mail server components in place, maintaining it will require a lot of time and attention. First, you need to install and configure it, but that’s not all.

3. Cost

Besides, the email system you patch together may not be as good in quality as a corporate cloud email system. While you can get developers to build out your system, it’s advisable to leave email hosting duties to email providers. Whatever fee they charge will pale significantly to what you’ll spend to maintain a custom system.

The required storage space and components of a comprehensive mail server create a situation of massive cost overruns for SaaS or web-based firms. Costs will spiral out of control when you eventually add gigabytes of email space in addition to web hosting and server maintenance.

4. Performance with more features

There are companies offering professional email hosting. They have the capacity to develop high quality of service and functionality that you likely don’t. The result is less downtime and intelligent spam filtering, better email filtering and efficiency, and industry-grade email search systems.

There are companies offering professional email hosting. They have the capacity to develop high quality of service and functionality that you likely don’t. The result is less downtime and intelligent spam filtering, better email filtering and efficiency, and industry-grade email search systems.

5. Troubleshooting blues

The fact that email is ubiquitous may lead some to believe that it is easy to troubleshoot, especially when one needs to consider email security and data security. You may wonder why intended recipients are not getting your messages.

These issues are often due to misconfigurations in any of the several mail server components. Yet, it may also be due to poor tuning of your outgoing spam filter or another problem such as a blacklist.

Conclusion

Hosting your own email may seem like the better option, especially if you consider taking complete control of your cybersecurity. However, it's essential to be aware of the costs, and those costs are not trivial.

Cybercriminals today use incredible sophisticated and convincing methods to fool those who are not aware of their schemes and attack vulnerable systems. But by staying educated and up to date about the latest cyber attack trends, you can keep your employees and business safe.

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