The world has, as of March 2017, 3.74 billion users of the internet. The number of people using email regularly in the United States is well over 200 million and rising. Every company doing business email faces a similar challenge: how to reach out to customers and receive and deal with customer emails in a timely fashion while avoiding the horrors of spam and email malware That’s where email solutions for small business are needed.
Understanding The Needs
- The world is constantly connected. The world is connected and increasingly customers are online at all times of the day or night. As this becomes everyone’s habit, consumers increasingly expect the companies they do business with to also be connected at all times and to respond to emails quickly. Email is crucial to business, but that creates problems of its own. It’s not uncommon for a business email to be flooded in spam, wasting time and resources.
- Spam is a serious issue. As of 2017, spam was nearly 60% of all email traffic. The United States is the origin of most unsolicited spam email, at over 12% of world’s volume. Email spam cost businesses more than $20 billion in 2012 in tech expenses and lost productivity. It is crucial for a small business to protect itself and its customer email list from spam by using reliable and capable email servers.
- The problem of malware. The Symantec 2017 Internet Security Threat Report found that email is still the primary way that malware gets around. One out of every 131 emails in 2016 contained malware, and two-thirds of malware is installed by way of email attachments. About 60% of spam comes from JavaScript attachments, and another 26% from macros embedded in Microsoft Office documents. In 2016 a breathtaking 76% of all companies fell victim to a phishing scam, putting themselves and their customers at risk.
Email Hosting Solutions
One of the best ways for a small business to protect itself from the dangers of spam, phishing, and malware is to use a Microsoft exchange alternative: a small host who understands the needs. In the name of cutting costs, too many entities leave themselves open to attack by trying to host email themselves, using their ISP’s slow, overloaded, neglected email, or going with a big company that has no personal support or–almost worse–support phone personnel working 24/7 but no engineers or technicians after 5pm or on the weekends. Smaller email servers are often the way to go, and there are a couple of good reasons why.
- They can offer better service. This is not universally true, of course, but it’s not uncommon for smaller hosts to have better service because they can actually develop relationships between support staff and clients. Customers find that when they call for help they’re regularly dealing with the same people: people who know their issues and background very well.
- They have lower server loads. Large hosts are after the big fish: clients that are spending a lot more money with them than a small business or charity could ever afford to do. This means that smaller clients sometimes get bundled on to share bandwidth with a huge conglomerate, meaning that servers are overloaded. Email servers hosting enormous corporations are also bigger targets for attack, and when their servers go down the small websites go down with them.
- Like understand like. Precisely because a smaller email hosting service is small they understand the challenges that small entities face. They know what kind of lost business a few hours of server crash can mean, and what that translates to when considering the bottom line.
If you have a small business, a charity, a religious organization, or any other kind of entity in need of safe, reliable email servers that are free of spam and protected from malware and phishing attacks, don’t try to go it alone or fall in with an enormous, nameless hosting service that will see you as just another number. Look for a small and reliable email host that’s investing in give you safe and reliable service.
