Email Hosting Options for Home/ Small Business

Email has become just as essential to large businesses as the telephone, and large companies spend a great deal of money on email systems like Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.

The good news for small business is that they can make use of email just like the large companies, but without the cost.

Email for small businesses can be almost free.

It all starts with a business domain name which costs around $8-$16. The domain name provides you with email addresses and a web address that you can use for your website if required.

However a domain name alone will not provide you with email storage. For that you will need email hosting which you can get either as part of a web hosting package or as separate email hosting.

Understanding Email hosting and Web Hosting

Because the primary means of contact for website owners is email then all web hosting providers provide email addresses and email hosting (mailboxes) as part of the web hosting package.

Here is a screenshot of 1and1 uk web hosting and email package showing the email part.

The three columns are for different packages, but even the most basic package has 20 email accounts which is enough for most small businesses.

You will find other web hosting accounts offer similar email facilities.

You can see that even the basic package has 20 email addresses (each with 2GByte storage) which is more than enough for most small businesses.

However what if you don't want a website but only email accounts. In this case you have two alternatives:

  • Purchase the web hosting package and just use the email accounts
  • Purchase an email only hosting.

Email Only Hosting

Generally this is cheaper than website hosting and if you purchase the email hosting from a provider that provides both email and web hosting then the features and management interface is the same.

In addition if you decide to get a website at a later date you just add it on and you manage it all from the same control panel.

You should be aware that not all web hosting providers currently provide an email only option and it they do not all provide more advanced business email features like Microsoft Exchange email and collaboration.

For USA based business you may want to take a look at

1and1.com 

and UK based businesses

1and1.co.uk

Once you have signed up for the domain name and hosting account you will then need to setup the email addresses and then configure the email client to access the email.

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