We’ve all been there. You wake up, grab a cup of coffee, open up your Macbook and proceed to draft an intelligent reply to that email that you’ve been postponing for days. Only now it’s become a little awkward and you’re left wondering if it’s best just pretending that you didn’t receive the email and it accidentally ended up in your junk mail folder. You decide to step up, draft your reply, proof read it and you hit the SEND button. What? An error? Blacklisted?? How can that be? I haven’t sent any spam emails? Aaaaah, the joys of hosting your email on a shared server that not only doubles up as a web server, but also a database server and whatever else your hosting company has decided to utilise the server for in an attempt to cut costs.

Welcome to 2022 where life is all about balance. On the one hand we have negatives like Covid, a looming recession, Eskom load shedding and eye-watering fuel prices, and on the other hand we have the good stuff like remote working, croissants on a Saturday morning, the quickly approaching festive season and cloud based email hosting.

In all seriousness though, unless you’re hosting your email with a quality cloud based email service like GMAIL, Zoho, Microsoft Exchange, or the like, you’re probably experiencing the bare minimum with respect to performance, functionality and availability. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that your typical web host that claims to be an all-in-one solution, can’t possibly operate at the same caliber as the aforementioned alpha enterprises that have been specialising in email and related online office / workplace services for decades.

Below we’ll take a deep dive into the pros and cons of cloud based email hosting versus the email hosting that comes bundled with your website from your jack-of-all-trades host:

CLOUD MAIL HOSTING

The Pros

• Ultra reliable
• Extremely well supported across all devices making setup a breeze
• In the unlikely event that you do experience an issue, there’s a 99% probability that it’s a device related problem rather than your cloud email provider
• Excellent user interfaces and tool sets allowing one to easily manage their mailboxes
• Some providers (e.g. Zoho) offer a free tier with the same top class performance, albeit less functionality, which is ideal for those on a budget or just starting out
• Often includes very useful tools for the workplace like online calendars, and those used to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations (think MS Office but all online)

The Cons

• More expensive, often requiring that you pay per mailbox
• Many bill in foreign currency meaning that your cost fluctuates in line with the exchange rate

GENERIC MAIL HOSTING

The Pros

• Free or very inexpensive as many generic hosts will bundle email accounts with a web hosting package
• Convenient in the sense that you’re using a single service provider for everything

The Cons

• Not well supported across all devices and will require manual setup and configuration in most cases
• Typically hosted on multipurpose shared servers together with hundreds of websites, databases and whatever else your host chooses to use said server for
• Very high chance of blacklisting due to hundreds or thousands of mailboxes hosted on the same server with the same IP address
• Blacklisting removal may take up to several days requiring that you either hold off on sending emails until the problem is resolved, or find an alternative mail provider
• Degraded performance and availability due to email hosting services being prioritised below web hosting and database hosting services
• With your email and website being hosted on the same server, you’re essentially putting all of your eggs into one basket and any incidents will see both becoming unavailable

At the end of the day you really need to sit down and ask yourself a serious question: How critical is email to my business?
If your business is one that deals with mission critical tasks on a daily basis and receiving an important email now, rather than 15 minutes later, could win you a new customer and / or contract, the answer should be a no-brainer.
If much of your business is done telephonically or your business pace is more relaxed, generic mail hosting may suffice. It’s basically free so who cares if you need to wait a while for the server to come back online or for the Serbian blacklist administrator to remove your mail server’s IP address so that you can again send email, right 😉

At Mshini we’re not about being all things to all people. We know our limitations and, while we reckon we do a mighty fine job of hosting WordPress sites, we realise that we couldn’t compete with the likes of GMAIL and Zoho when it comes to hosting email and their suite of workplace efficiency products. For this reason, we’ve partenered up with Zoho and we’re making Zoho mailboxes available to our customers. We’ll bill you directly so you’re still only paying one business to host your website and to manage your email. The best of both worlds right? Kind of like a Tesla Model X, just more reliable. If you’ve read this blog post and you’re keen to get your mail hosted in the cloud, click here to get started with Zoho.