Article by Jerlou Thompson

E-mails are the lifeblood of businesses. Similar to a chat room, email messages, whether to individuals or to a group, operate as a real-time conversation with people you work with or people who play vital roles in your daily grind. Lightning fast and easier to formulate than an essay, emails take human communication to a new dimension because of its integration into mobile technology. The popularity and flexibility of email became the core advantage of email hosting services, which put free email domains to shame.

Email hosting provides the same basic services as free email domains. These basic email services, which include creating folders, a search feature, and email forwarding, also appear in text-only e-mail software. Additional benefits, such as receiving and sending e-mails in HTML format using a WYSIWYG menu, also exist in a paid email host through email clients with a more sophisticated user interface than text-only software. More advanced email clients use a drag-and-drop feature to facilitate labeling and filing emails by their sender, subject or any relevant category.

However, because free e-mail services are rather limited in size, email hosting becomes the better choice. Free email services usually cap your email usage at only ten gigabytes of space for all e-mails you send or receive and the files attached to them. In contrast, email hosting doubles this size as well as provide an unlimited attachment size for heavy users.

With free emails, you can only send a file as large as 25 MB. For very large files, you have to use other means, such as uploading the files into a storage service, such as MediaFire or Rapidshare or you may use software, such as Dropbox, which connects several computers to a shared folder similar to a P2P connection. Both methods leave your computer vulnerable to virus or spyware. On the contrary, email hosting uses a secure SSL connection between computing devices and the email server where vital company information resides. In addition, the data encryption in e-mails prevents unauthorized persons from reading the messages in transit.

Aside from data encryption and an SSL connection, companies who buy an email hosting package also acquire protection from viruses, phishing, and the more dangerous denial-of-service attacks to web services. Most computers come with an installation of an anti-virus program. However, desktop software is inadequate and inappropriate against server protection. Installing anti-virus software for servers, such as Mail Washer, strengthens email security in your company.

Finally, email hosting professionalizes your business emails. Your employees will thank you for an email address that uses a business domain instead of the generic Yahoo or Hotmail address. The negative perception of many people regarding email addresses from Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL spells a difference when you find out your emails go straight to the junk folder. Many spammers and scammers use these email domains in sending their annoying emails to you. Most importantly, a business email address that uses a custom domain assures you that people who matter to you and your business read all of your correspondence with them.