How long can you live without your email?

If you own a website or are considering having one built, at some point you have considered moving away from your free-mail service and email addresses like JacksBusinessStuff@gmail.com. Email accounts on your own domain is a great first step to having a professional online presence (jack@jacksbusinessstuff.com). But it’s only the first step.

Most website owners don’t give a second thought to how they are hosting email accounts. Many web hosts offer unlimited email accounts for free with domain hosting. That sounds great, but there are many problems with this approach, not the least of which is that if your website goes down, so does your email. Why is that? Because they are on the same server (computer at the hosting company). Free email on your web host is also less secure than other options. You might say “We’ve been running our email this way for years with no problem”. No doubt. But what will you do if there is a catastrophic failure and you cannot access or recover any of your email? Many companies could stand to lose years’ of correspondence and important information that is (unwisely) stored in emails.

Carrie Dils has a great post about this here: http://www.carriedils.com/web-hosting-email/

If you are hosting your email in the same place as your website, you need to ask yourself how long your business can operate without email. A day? A week? If your website goes down, it’s a pain, but unless you have an online store, chances are it is not mission critical. Email, on the other hand, is essential to the way most businesses operate today and even a few hours of email downtime is crippling.

You get what you pay for

Why do small companies accept the cost of multiple phone and fax lines but oppose the idea of paying for email. Perhaps it is conditioning by cheap web hosting companies, perhaps it is simply lack of education on the subject. We strongly recommend hosting your email on a third party system like Google Apps for Business, Microsoft Office 365, or Microsoft Exchange. These are not free services, but if you are a small business owner, maybe it’s time to accept paid email services as a part of your overall communications spend.