Best Exchange Hosting Providers
Looking for the best exchange hosting provider for your business? Learn what important features you should look before choosing an email host for your business.
The biggest benefit for shared Exchange hosting is IT labor cost savings. Labor accounts most of an in-house Exchange system’s cost. However, for a low, predictable monthly rate, a shared Exchange hosting solution provides you with a team of Microsoft Exchange experts managing, supporting, and even upgrading your email system around the clock.
Why Host Your Exchange Server?
Insourced vs Outsourced Exchange
As your business grows, it is quite obvious that you need a simple but robust solution to keep your staff internally connected with each other. That system needs to be patched and upgraded periodically to take advantage of new features. The servers they run on need maintenance contracts for fast part replacement when they fail, and those systems need their OS and Firmware patched regularly to keep them performing? Is the environment secured? Are backups really working?!?!?
As a business owner you have to ask yourself if you really want to build a competency around ensuring your critical email systems are running at all time, or do you want to build competencies around using email as a tool to respond to prospects and serve clients?
What to Look for in an Exchange Hosting Provider
What the others won’t tell you
First, most alleged review sites are loaded with links that have affiliate codes in them. Their sole purpose is to collect a referral fee when you sign up with any of the Exchange hosting providers they link to. Hardly unbiased or authoritative. Hence no affiliate links are here. So here are several things for you to consider when making your choice:
1) Does every one of your email boxes need to be on the same expensive plan? Some hosted email providers allow you to choose a big plan for executives, a slighter smaller plan for most staff, and then an Outlook Web Access (OWA) plan for contractors and remote staff. This can save you significantly on your monthy fees.
2) Is their hosting location(s) outside of natural disaster locations? This is one of the reasons you are hosting, remember.
3) How are you going to migrate your email to them? How easy are their tools? Some hosting firms will do this for you for free or inexpensively.
4) Is the platform they are selling the latest (e.g. Exchange Server 2010). You would be surprised that some of the big providers still are on Exchangee 2007. It would be fooling to migrate to old technology.
5) Are there many complaints when you google for “______ issues”?
6) Are the support staff in the US or overseas, and can you understand them. Having people who you can understand, and who can understand you when there is an issue is important