E-mail in a smaller company - choice and a reserve plan in case of any trouble
A big number of smaller companies does not give enough attention to a very important communication channel – e-mail. It may happen that they communicate via free public e-mail services like hotmail.com, yahoo.com and gmail.com, which, from the point of view of their clients, makes them looks unprofessional. Of course we are in 21st century and for any company it is commonly expected, that it posseses its own website and consequently also binded e-mail adresses of such template: firstname.lastname@company.com.
I think that in most cases the majority of smaller companies avoids purchasing and maintaining of their own email server, which is in most cases a wise decision. They rather host their website and email accounts on servers of one of the public services.
They have to look after the basic options when choosing host email server:
- 24/7 accessibility
- authenticated reliability
- avoidance of intercessors when renting host
- an option of contacting the system administrator at any time
- the price should not play the main role when choosing a host server!
To everyone is clear (as least theoretically) that it is necessary to have reserve plans and safety measures, if there occurs any unexpected trouble. These problems can be connected with saving data, internet breakdown, hardware breakdown, frequent timeouts or some other technical problems with the email server… It is only our awareness and the awareness of the company that could prevent or at least reduce the damage done to our system in these exceptional situations.
May we return back to the reserve plan for ‘’Our email server does not operate’’. What to do? Should we wait for the repair crew to do their work, ignore the problems and keep working? These are surely not the things we want to do in this situation.
One of the options is to aid ourselves with one of many commercial e-mail host servers.
This could be temporary, until our own mail server is fixed, changed or maintained in some other way, or we find out that they hold both quality and reliability, which are two of the basic factors to help us to focus only on our primary activity.
The only things left that to do is to redirect all the mail traffic on our web domain to our new commercial web server.