Business email hosting options and a rant

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wsnz

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#1596831 22-Jul-2016 13:06

clinty:

lxsw20:

If it's just Email you need, then the Office 365 plan is only $6/$11.90 per user per month depending on what features you need. Pretty cheap for 7 users really. I set it up for myself just to see how it all works. It's pretty easy to set up.

The pricing changed a while back - $7.50 and $13.50 excl GST now for new customers

Office 365 Business plans

Clint

The $6/month Exchange Online service is still available, but for $1.50 more per month you get the Business Essentials online suite with 1TB of storage.

timmmay

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#1596861 22-Jul-2016 13:08

Disrespective:

We pay about $20 a month for our hosting and email, however our website is actually now hosted on Squarespace so it's really just domain hosting and redirecting. Our office is Wellington based.

We currently have a joint 15GB of mailbox storage and it's filling fast so that will cause an issue before the year is out I suspect.

Pretty much any of the options will work - Google, Microsoft, or Fastmail if you don't need much storage is cheaper. You just have to decide which one you like really. I've done plenty of small business email migrations, but they tend to be one or two user migrations. Happy to help if you need it.

mattwnz

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#1596863 22-Jul-2016 13:10

Disrespective:

We pay about $20 a month for our hosting and email, however our website is actually now hosted on Squarespace so it's really just domain hosting and redirecting. Our office is Wellington based.

We currently have a joint 15GB of mailbox storage and it's filling fast so that will cause an issue before the year is out I suspect.

If you download your emails and archive the older ones locally if using IMAP, you should be able to only need a fraction of that diskspace. The thing about normal shared webhosting servers is that they not really designed for people to store large quantities of emails on on a permanent basis, as your standard single hosting server only has a fixed amount of storage in it. If you are wanting to store your old emails in the cloud, you are best to use a service like Gmail or Office 365, which use proper purpose built email servers, and have larger capacities. But I would backup all email locally too anyway.

timmmay

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#1596865 22-Jul-2016 13:20

mattwnz:

If you download your emails and archive the older ones locally if using IMAP, you should be able to only need a fraction of that diskspace. The thing about normal shared webhosting servers is that they not really designed for people to store large quantities of emails on on a permanent basis, as your standard single hosting server only has a fixed amount of storage in it. If you are wanting to store your old emails in the cloud, you are best to use a service like Gmail or Office 365, which use proper purpose built email servers, and have larger capacities. But I would backup all email locally too anyway.

I do this for personal email (mailstore home), but it introduces a business risk as local storage is likely less durable than cloud storage with a good provider. Online storage is cheap, I wouldn't bother.

Disrespective

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#1596866 22-Jul-2016 13:26

Yeah, we regularly have email conversations with engineers where the attachments reach over 100MB, and we do this every few months. We also need access to several years of email conversations due to the length of some of our projects (my current project will be three years long, and every second email will have images or pdf's attached, before I expect no more contact is needed).

I think i'll have a sit down with the boss-man about an approach we should take. Local backups of our emails are currently done via time machine backups of a whole machine although i'm slowly getting us moving to a NAS and cloud backups as well.

mattwnz

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#1596868 22-Jul-2016 13:30

timmmay:

mattwnz:

If you download your emails and archive the older ones locally if using IMAP, you should be able to only need a fraction of that diskspace. The thing about normal shared webhosting servers is that they not really designed for people to store large quantities of emails on on a permanent basis, as your standard single hosting server only has a fixed amount of storage in it. If you are wanting to store your old emails in the cloud, you are best to use a service like Gmail or Office 365, which use proper purpose built email servers, and have larger capacities. But I would backup all email locally too anyway.

I do this for personal email (mailstore home), but it introduces a business risk as local storage is likely less durable than cloud storage with a good provider. Online storage is cheap, I wouldn't bother.

That is putting a lot of faith in a cloud provider, especially as they are likely to have a clause in their terms saying that you are required to retain your own local backups of anything you store on their servers. I know web hosts who have lost all their customers emails before. eg a servers harddrive dies, they then find their backups are corrupt. Or they have to roll back to a very old backup. It is far more likely to happen with the small $20 per month and less website hosts. But even big providers have lost customers data. Even MS with Sidekick lost customer data. IMO businesses should do local backups , and an offsite backup of this local data. Unless you have multiple copies, you have no redundancy in place. It also makes migrating to a new email provider a lot easier in the future.

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networkn

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#1596869 22-Jul-2016 13:40

My policy of backups and hosting/cloud in general is, if YOU value it, then YOU should ensure backups are completed by YOU!

mattwnz

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#1596883 22-Jul-2016 14:44

Disrespective:

Yeah, we regularly have email conversations with engineers where the attachments reach over 100MB, and we do this every few months. We also need access to several years of email conversations due to the length of some of our projects (my current project will be three years long, and every second email will have images or pdf's attached, before I expect no more contact is needed).

I think i'll have a sit down with the boss-man about an approach we should take. Local backups of our emails are currently done via time machine backups of a whole machine although i'm slowly getting us moving to a NAS and cloud backups as well.

I think you probably guess that when you are only paying $20 for such an essential service for all those users, something probably doesn't add up. Although some businesses still use the free ISP email account they get.

timmmay

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#1596896 22-Jul-2016 15:01

mattwnz:

That is putting a lot of faith in a cloud provider, especially as they are likely to have a clause in their terms saying that you are required to retain your own local backups of anything you store on their servers. I know web hosts who have lost all their customers emails before. eg a servers harddrive dies, they then find their backups are corrupt. Or they have to roll back to a very old backup. It is far more likely to happen with the small $20 per month and less website hosts. But even big providers have lost customers data. Even MS with Sidekick lost customer data. IMO businesses should do local backups , and an offsite backup of this local data. Unless you have multiple copies, you have no redundancy in place. It also makes migrating to a new email provider a lot easier in the future.

I'm not saying don't back it up, I'm saying don't MOVE it from the cloud provider to your systems. Keep the information in both places.

For example, Amazon (as an example) keeps three copies of most types of data, in three locations, so if any two drives fail they can still access the information. Yes it can still be lost if say an account is closed, so backups are important, but most have pretty good storage systems and backups.

Disrespective

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#1596900 22-Jul-2016 15:09

mattwnz:

Disrespective:

Yeah, we regularly have email conversations with engineers where the attachments reach over 100MB, and we do this every few months. We also need access to several years of email conversations due to the length of some of our projects (my current project will be three years long, and every second email will have images or pdf's attached, before I expect no more contact is needed).

I think i'll have a sit down with the boss-man about an approach we should take. Local backups of our emails are currently done via time machine backups of a whole machine although i'm slowly getting us moving to a NAS and cloud backups as well.

I think you probably guess that when you are only paying $20 for such an essential service for all those users, something probably doesn't add up. Although some businesses still use the free ISP email account they get.

Oh, absolutely. We aren't mission critical on our emails, but it's a massive hassle when they're down and we have a deadline. It took me a year before I could convince the office to move to imap so emails could be checked at site visits in front of the builder.

As far as the cost of ~$1600 per year for a whole office email (and office apps) goes, it's negligible. We finally have a digital backup solution in place too, so i'm slowly making strides to get the office fully modernised.

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