Let’s discuss shared hosting for just a second. Shared hosting enables many clients to reside on a single machine instance. That is, one machine divides the resources within its capacity in terms of memory, CPU network speed, etc to all the tenants hosting their services on it. This makes shared hosting the default option for many since it requires little or no understanding of the underlying server technology and it is one of the most affordable hosting options out there.
Emails are important and setup could be low cost
Emails are a critical means of communication for businesses in today’s world. Since shared hosting is affordable and offers business owners the ability to create emails, it seems to be a no-brainer. It turns out that the primary and sole benefit just happens to be the low cost but there is a need to find out if things could actually be better and how significant is the cost increase.
The comfort and flexibility that comes with owning a private house is about the same reason enterprise email services are sought after.
Let’s look at the problems with shared email hosting:
- Shared resources
- Limited quotas
- Slow services if the workload becomes too high for the machine
- If your neighbour is getting spammed you are on the same block (your common host is receiving countless requests that would impede your own services
- If your neighbour is doing the spamming your entire block gets a bad name regardless of your innocence
- The cluster of clients is a better target for attacks
- Loss of service might just be more expensive than dedicated hosting
On the other hand with an enterprise email solution;
- Helps businesses easily scale as you can easily add or remove users easily
- You get to only pay for the user you create emails for
- Improve team collaboration & productivity via additional integrated applications besides your business Emails like Calendar, Chat, Video Conferencing, Contacts, and Cloud Storage.
- You get an admin dashboard to easily manage your users
- You can manage mobile devices attached to your enterprise email account
- More highly secure with enterprise-grade security & spam filters
Cheap email solutions have downsides (a real estate narrative)
Sometimes what one would find out is that regardless of the cost implications (which isn’t too much anyway) it’s not worth the risk to have your business emails stay on shared hosting services.
Let’s look at shared hosting like real estate. Imagine you got an apartment in a block of flats on a street and one of the tenants with whom you are sharing the block does illicit business. Off the top of your head, you would think that you have a specific address that is peculiar to you and you are meant to be correct but that is at the granular level within the block. You see, to the rest of the world, the entire block has just one address and so if there is a bad egg on the block, the rest of the world simply labels the entire block as bad.
How email messaging works in shared hosting
Let’s take this to compute. The block is just like the single machine we talked about earlier on with you as one of many tenants on it. In shared hosting, when a machine with multiple clients receives a request to a particular client, it routes it internally but on the big screen, the machine only has one address to the public internet.
You can get blacklisted because your primary host is blacklisted
So if your business is using shared hosting for its emails and one of your users happens to be generating spam (and usually it’s not possible to know what a user would do until they start, by which time the machine may have been blacklisted depending on who finds out first and when); chances are your business would lose email services once the IP for the hosting machine gets blacklisted.
An alternative to shared hosting (Software as a service solution)
Surprisingly, an enterprise email platform like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and so on can save you a lot more money than even the free shared hosting emails. Shared hosting emails come with a set storage limit, which means your users will need to purge their emails once every few months when email limits are exceeded as your emails share the same storage size with other files in your shared hosting account. This could not only be time-consuming but could leave you losing valuable emails and files in the long run.
How should you proceed?
In conclusion, while for budget reasons, you may have started off on shared email hosting, there are very valid reasons to upgrade to dedicated hosting, and the difference in cost may not be too far apart in the long run besides the risk exposure that comes with shared hosting.
Now if you are thinking about what email solution works best for your business or you have already made a decision but you are not sure how to proceed you can visit enterprise@whogohost.com or send a mail to enterprise@whogohost.com . Not only do we help businesses set up email hosting on dedicated servers, but we also set up SaaS such as google workspace and office 365 at very affordable rates with support.
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