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Email hosting is simply a specialised web hosting service that enables businesses, for example, to manage their corporate email communications to a high standard.
The biggest advantage is that it lends businesses a significant degree of professionalism, as correspondence takes place via email addresses with their own domain name, which has been proven to increase trust and, indirectly, supports brand building.
A good email hosting service can offer numerous benefits, but only if you can choose the right one. This is often the biggest challenge, so in this article we’d like to help you understand what factors to consider before making a purchase.
If you’re looking for reliable hosting for your email, click on the following link: email hosting.
A free email address, an account linked to your hosting plan, or a separate email hosting service?
When it comes to business email, you can essentially choose from three different solutions:
| Free email account | Account provided with web hosting | Dedicated email hosting | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Title | @gmail.com, @freemail.hu | own domain | own domain |
| Fees | free | included in the hosting fee | special fee |
| Resources | the provider’s | shared with the website | just his correspondence |
| Support | typically not available | from the web hosting provider | the provider’s |
- Free email accounts: good for personal use, but less so for businesses. An address ending in
@gmail.comdoesn’t feature your business name, and if you lose access to the account, there’s no one to turn to for help. - Email accounts included with web hosting: with most web hosting plans, you can also set up email accounts using your own domain. It’s convenient and inexpensive, but the email service runs on the same storage and resources as the website, so the space used by the email accounts is deducted from the website’s storage quota. For smaller businesses with just a few email accounts, this is often sufficient.
- Dedicated email hosting: your email service is provided as a separate hosting plan, independent of your website. This is worth considering if you need a large number of mailboxes, your emails are large in size, or your website is hosted elsewhere (for example, on an e-commerce platform).
A company’s terms and conditions also cover free email accounts: company email addresses remain the property of the company, even if an employee leaves; you can transfer, redirect or archive the email account. Furthermore, a service provider may restrict or suspend a free account without giving a reason, whereas with a paid subscription, they guarantee availability.
Whichever you choose, you’ll first need a domain name for your own domain address.
The key factors to consider when choosing email hosting
Email storage capacity
If you’re looking for an email hosting service that fully meets your needs, the first and most important thing to consider is storage capacity. Fortunately, this is the easiest aspect to navigate when comparing what different providers have to offer.
The reason for this is that everyone offers both smaller and larger solutions, so customers can decide which is the ideal choice for them. But here’s the problem: many people don’t know which hosting plan is sufficient, and which is too little or too much?
For a smaller company, for example, even 5–10 GB of storage per account may be sufficient – it’s not worth going below that – but for larger organisations, 50–100 GB of email storage is essential, particularly if they need to send a large number of emails and larger files as part of their work.
Of course, we do have the option of purchasing unlimited email hosting, but in this case we should always consider whether it is worth it for us, and whether our business will grow enough for us to make full use of the unlimited storage capacity.
Above a certain level, particularly where there are a large number of departments, or in the case of specialist service providers or online shops, for example, this is generally not even an issue.
It is just as important that the package can be upgraded later without any issues, and that you don’t have to delete old emails when the storage runs out. At aWh, the Mail Start package starts with 5 GB of storage, Mail Medium offers 15 GB, Mail Business 35 GB and Mail Pro 50 GB, and you can upgrade to a larger plan at any time without your email service being interrupted.
Support for your own domain name
Although we are aware that many people look for email hosting in the first place because they want an email address with their own domain name – and most providers offer this – we must emphasise the importance of domain name support, as this is not always the case.
This means that, with the help of email hosting, we can generate completely unique, branded email addresses – for every key employee or department.
This allows us to create email addresses such as info@sajatcegnev.hu, sales@sajatcegnev.hu or cegvezetoneve@sajatcegnev.hu, for example.
Reliability and availability
When it comes to email hosting, uptime is just as important as it is for standard web hosting; in fact, it is perhaps even more important to pay attention to it, as there can be no errors or major downtime in corporate email – it must be guaranteed to run non-stop.
After all, we can’t know when an important enquiry or client might contact us, only for their email not to reach us, or for us to be unable to reply in time, because the hosting service isn’t working.
It is very important that email hosting guarantees at least 99 per cent uptime for the customer, as this effectively means, on an annual basis, that there are no downtimes lasting several days, or even several hours.
Obviously, maintenance work cannot be included in this calculation, but these interventions are carried out precisely to ensure that the servers always function properly and handle our email, meaning there are no unexpected outages. What’s more, most providers usually carry out this maintenance outside peak hours, for example, by scheduling it for the night-time.
Particular attention must be paid to security
When choosing an email hosting service, it is essential to pay attention to security, as the internet now permeates every aspect of life, cyberattacks are a daily occurrence, and not even a small business can afford to take this lightly – especially when it comes to email.
For this reason, it is strongly recommended that you pay attention to factors such as ensuring that your email hosting service includes robust anti-virus and anti-spam protection, which you or your system administrator can then further tighten or fine-tune via software settings.
It is by no means a disadvantage if your email hosting comes with an SSL/TLS certificate, as this guarantees encrypted data transmission, ensuring that your business emails are always as secure as possible and that no one other than the sender and recipient can view them.
Furthermore, from a security perspective, 2FA – that is, two-factor authentication – and regular backups are certainly no disadvantage, as it would be a major problem if the company’s email system were to disappear completely from one day to the next for any reason.
Email is accessible from anywhere
When choosing a standardised email hosting service for a company, it is essential to ensure that emails can be accessed from anywhere – and indeed, that the issue of access not only from anywhere but at any time is also clearly addressed.
For this reason, it is important to consider platform independence when making a choice; in our case, this means that emails must be accessible from a desktop computer just as easily as from a mobile app, which is why support for IMAP/POP3 is also essential.
It is, in fact, common within a company for certain staff members to be travelling and not at their own workstations. In such cases, it is unacceptable for corporate communication to come to a standstill, as they need to stay in touch with their colleagues even whilst on business trips.
Given the specifics, it is useful if the email hosting service is compatible with Outlook and Thunderbird, and can also communicate with a range of mobile clients.
It offers simple administration options
What administrative features should you consider when choosing an email hosting service? Primarily the basic functions that allow you, for example, to manage users, change passwords or create new accounts.
This is very important, as even in a smaller company, several people manage the corporate email system, and the email hosting can handle an unlimited number of accounts, meaning that not only senior management but also individual departments and team leaders can have personalised email addresses.
In addition, the simple administration options also make it possible to delete or modify an email address if necessary, meaning that, alongside logging, they provide the system administrator with full access.
Convenience features: aliases, forwarding, calendar
In addition to webmail, other useful features include a shared calendar and address book, automatic reply messages (for example, whilst on holiday), email forwarding, aliases (such as szamlazas@ or ajanlat@ addresses, which are routed to an existing mailbox) and filters. With these features, even a small team can manage shared email addresses in an organised manner. The aWh email hosting service includes a calendar and address book integrated into Roundcube webmail, 50–500 aliases depending on the hosting plan, unlimited forwarding and message filters.
Support and the support team are very important
When it comes to email hosting, it is absolutely essential that users receive adequate support from the provider. This is primarily provided by the support team, which can be a critical factor for a hosting provider.
The reason for this is simply to ensure that the company’s communication channels remain accessible at all times, and that, should any problems arise, users know who to turn to and how to seek assistance; from this perspective, these options are by no means to be overlooked.
It may be important, for example, to know how to contact the support team. Is it only via chat, email or telephone? Do they offer support, for example? If they are only available via text-based channels, how quickly do they respond and how effective are they?
This is particularly important not only for web hosting but also for email hosting, as smooth communication is one of the foundations of success.
Let’s pay attention to scalability and integration
Scalability and integration are also extremely important factors to consider when choosing an email hosting service. What does this mean in practice?
The issue of scalability essentially requires no further explanation. Ideally, companies will eventually outgrow their email storage capacity – unless they have opted for an unlimited plan – and in such cases, scalability is essential.
Integration is a slightly more complex issue. We can talk about email hosting that integrates well if it offers the option to link up with other services, such as a Drive folder, a CRM or even a calendar.
Another aspect related to integration is whether the email hosting service supports collaborative activities; for example, whether it can be integrated with Google Workspace or Microsoft’s office tools designed to facilitate corporate communication and productivity.
Ensure you have the option to back up and restore your data
Last but by no means least, we must also ensure that the email hosting service offers the option to back up data and, in the event of a problem, to easily restore it without significant loss.
All this is important because a great deal of vital information is exchanged in corporate correspondence, and a vast amount of data changes hands that is essential for efficient operations and for maintaining flexibility in work processes.
Although, with adequate security and infrastructure in place, email hosting services rarely experience problems involving significant data loss, in this age of cyberattacks, one can never be too vigilant in this regard.
It is therefore important to check, for example, whether the email hosting service provides regular backups. With daily automatic backups, for instance, the process can be fully automated, ensuring complete peace of mind should any problems arise.
For this reason, we should also consider the recovery options. Although these usually go hand in hand with backups, there may be cases – albeit very rare ones – where this is not guaranteed, and only the ability to save previous correspondence is available.
We should therefore choose an email hosting service that guarantees regular backups of our emails and, in the event of a problem, their full restoration, so that there is never a prolonged interruption to business communications.
Needs assessment: how many email accounts and how much hosting do you need?
Before you choose a plan, answer these questions:
- How many email accounts do you need? Make a list of your staff, and factor in future growth as well as a few spare accounts.
- How large can emails and attachments be? For an office worker, 5–10 GB per account may be sufficient, whilst a designer who regularly sends large files may need several times that amount.
- Do you need shared email addresses? Addresses such as
info@,iroda@orrendeles@do not always require a separate mailbox: they can be forwarded to, or set up as aliases for, one or more existing accounts. - What program do you use to check your emails? If you read your emails on multiple devices (such as a computer and a mobile phone), use IMAP, as it keeps your folders synchronised across all devices.
The basics of security: SPF, DKIM, DMARC and two-factor authentication
As well as spam and virus filtering, three DNS records determine whether your emails appear trustworthy to the recipient’s server, and prevent others from sending emails in your name:
- The SPF record specifies which servers are authorised to send emails on behalf of the domain.
- DKIM uses a digital signature to verify that the email has not been altered in transit.
- DMARC tells the receiving server what to do with emails that fail both checks.
As well as your password, two-factor authentication adds an extra layer of security: here’s how to enable it for your account on cPanel hosting. Manage your work emails on a phone that has screen lock and encryption enabled, and only use a VPN when connected to public Wi-Fi. If a device is lost, change the passwords for the associated email accounts immediately.
Changing providers: how to migrate your email
If you already have a business email address, the switch involves three steps: copying your existing emails to your new inboxes (using IMAP synchronisation), updating your domain’s MX records to point to the new provider, and finally configuring your email clients with the new server details. The entire process is described in our email migration guide.