Exchange hosting

Overview
You can rely on exchange email hosting services to reliably host and manage your email communications saving you from all the hassles and considerable amount of expenses. Exchange hosting services are available for businesses of all sizes.

What is Hosted Exchange?
Basically, hosted exchange services allow you to access business emails even when you’re not connected to the office network. People often need this facility when they’re out of office for business trip, casual vacations or on account of emergency. Hosted exchange services are offered mostly in pay-as-you-go model, ensuring that you don’t end up paying unnecessarily, if you don’t use the services.

Why Hosted Exchange Email?
Hosted Exchange Email solutions offer a plethora of advantages, starting from feature rich exchange environment down to ability to access business emails on the move. But, you’re free from the worries/troubles involved with of server set-up infrastructure and maintenance costs.

What to Expect from Exchange Hosting Services
Most of the exchange hosting service providers offers high flexibility and ease-to-use services. You should expect:

• Business-class messaging solutions
• Collaboration and group scheduling
• 24/7 live telephone support
• 100% Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Reliable company email and business exchange hosting solutions
Let us cover some of the major points in detail:

• Value for Money: A good exchange email hosting should provide a speedy yet cost effective way to implement business-class communications, facilitating you to build your own solution at affordable prices. You should also look for free goodies, and high reliability to ensure that you get 100% value for every penny paid!
• Guaranteed Reliability: If you’re paying for exchange hosting, you should look for 100% Service Level Agreement (SLA), to ensure that your email is always available, and that your email addresses are never leaked out. Unless you’re not sure about reliability, you should not go ahead with that particular exchange hosting service provider.
• Hassle-free Control: It is not just about finding affordable exchange server hosting, and exchange email hosting service providers, as you also need hassle-free control over your business operations. Ideally a highly intuitive web-based management console that provides complete control over your business communications and operations is something that’s a must have feature. It should allow you to add users, delete accounts, add storage and do any operation with few clicks, without scratching your head to understand the operation of the management console.

Complete Business Communications
Small to midsize organizations require a comprehensive business communications solution comprising of email, collaboration, and more, at a reasonable price. It is always advisable to find a host that can take care of your Microsoft exchange hosting, exchange email hosting, as well as other business exchange hosting needs.

Microsoft Hosted Exchange Email Services
Now, even if you don’t want to invest in infrastructure, you can share the advantages of Microsoft Exchange 2007, and stay securely connected with the help of Microsoft exchange hosting services. This simply means you can stay connected whether you drive, sleep or work online. The Microsoft hosted exchange email services also come with option of synchronization with mobile devices, compliance and archival features, advanced security, and more (though you may need to pay a bit extra for these additional features and these may not be available on the basic exchange hosting plans – check with your host to find out about them).

Salient Features of Exchange Hosted Services
Almost all Exchange hosted service plans come with the following salient features:

• Fully-featured email
• Collaboration services of MS Exchange 2007
• Free downloadable copy of Outlook 2007/Entourage 2008
• 24/7 live customer support
• 100% Secure SLA
• Management Portals
• Free account set-up
• Full protocol support of all types including IMAP, MAPI, OWA and POP
• Free company SharePoint site and more…

Pricing Details
Looking at the current pricing, you need to pay average of $8-10 per month for 1GB mailbox per user, but if the size of the organization is larger, they you can avail bulk discounts on the business plans. Usually the exchange server hosting services are priced as per pay-as-you-go format, and you need to pay a nominal amount for all the services, and you pay more depending upon your usage of the concerned services.

SharePoint Collaboration Services with Integrated Hosted Email Exchange
Apart from several web-based collaboration tools, and all the necessary features many of the exchange hosting service providers offer free integrated SharePoint site as a value added service. You can also opt for additional facilities such as:

• Secure SSL
• Additional Storage
• Personalized URL
• Additional Users

ActiveSync and Direct Push technologies allow you to stay connected and access your hosted exchange emails even via mobile devices, PDAs, iPhone and Blackberry devices, and other smartphones.

In a Nutshell
Microsoft Hosted Exchange Email Services are the buzzword in IT industry and even small size businesses need such facilities. Therefore, the exchange service providers work on pay-as-you-go model, so that small businesses don’t need to spend a lot initially towards subscription charges and they can control their monthly costs as per their business needs. Although organizations of all size make use of exchange hosting services, they are relatively inexpensive and suitable even for the start-up companies. Unless you’ve an extremely large organization that can handle the set-up, maintenance and all the troubles involved in the process, hosted exchange services are an ideal solution, that too they’re available at a reasonable price. You get true value for money, and hassle-free control over your business communications as well as easy administration.

Pricing of most of the exchange server hosting plans doesn’t vary much, so you should pay more attention to the facilities offered in the plan rather than finding which plan costs you a dollar lesser. At the end of the day, you’re going to pay for whatever you use, so there’s no point in worrying about the nominal charges. It is most important to pick a reliable exchange hosting provider and pick a plan that fulfills all your requirements, and offers you maximum flexibility.