Almost any start-up today will choose to host their email in the cloud, simply because the cost (not to mention the reliability) is really hard to argue with. Put simply, no company faced with the choice of spending countless thousands of dollars on an in-house email server will choose that route over the vastly more cost-effective option offered by an almost limitless array of providers.
However, the equation is often viewed differently for companies with in-house email servers. The cost proposition can look different for those companies (at least on the surface) because of the enormous expense of setting up on-site email servers. Often done in the days prior to externally hosted email being widely available is a sunk cost. The cost of keeping that server online and servicing users can look cost-effective month-to-month compared to going hosted.
The Onsite Email Hosting Hassle
But have you ever considered what hosting your email on-premises does to your internet connection? Email is one of the absolute worst things that you can host on-site in this respect. Sending, receiving and distributing emails almost entirely consume an otherwise perfectly adequate and fast internet connection. Take, for example, sending out a PDF to a list of 10 or 20 people. When your email is hosted on-premises, that PDF has to be uploaded from your office 10 or 20 times (to the recipients’ different mail servers). Of course, when you’re on hosted email, it has to do so as well, but only once!
Take another example, which is becoming more and more common – your staff syncing their emails on multiple devices outside the office (home PCs, Laptops, Tablets, and, of course, the ubiquitous smartphones). When the central store of their mailbox is in your office, this creates the same problem. A single email with a simple attachment arrives (downloads) and then has to sync to all those devices (uploads) – so again that one attachment might have to upload across your internet connection 3 or 4 or more times. When hosting in the cloud, the email arrives and is distributed to all those devices without even crossing your office internet connection – except, of course, just once to download to the PC in the office.
Internet Connectivity Upgrade
This is all worth keeping in mind when it comes time to look at options for the internet connectivity at your premises. Yes, of course it is fantastic to have ultra-fast fibre or similar, but if that isn’t an option, then the other side of the coin is to ask what capacity can you free up – and if you’ve got a ready-for-retirement email server in the back room, it is definitely target number one.
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