The Importance of Reliable Email
Your business email is likely one of the main forms of communication between you and your clients or potential clients. When you are just getting started, making sure that you have reliable communication is key to growing your business and it’s legitimacy. But some ways to host your email are more reliable then others, so make sure you know the facts before you choose your method.
Why You Need Custom Email For Your Business
Most businesses are going to want email addresses specific to their domain (e.g. yourname@yourdomain.com). The email you send to potential clients and customers is likely making the first impression for your business, so you don’t really want it to be yourbusiness@gmail.com or yourbusiness@outlook.com – those would feel fake or spammy. So to setup a custom email address, you will need a custom email server for sending and receiving emails. This isn’t as hard as you think.
CPanel Web Server
I’m going to talk about this method first even though this is the way that I would advise AGAINST setting up your email. If you have a domain (URL address) it’s likely because you have a business website that lives at that domain. With most of the mainstream web hosting companies, you can manage your website and webserver through the CPanel interface – which includes a built in custom email server. It’s fair quick and simple to setup, and the costs are (or should be) included in your hosting fee. Here are the reasons I would recommend not setting up your custom business email through CPanel or web hosting you have for your website:
- If your web server goes down, so does your email
When you put all your eggs in one basket (i.e. your email and website on the same host) it means that if your server goes down, everything is down and people will have no way to contact you. When they are hosted separately, it means that if your website goes does, people can still email you, and if your email goes down, people can still access your website. - Lack of send and receive speed
While email sent and received with an email server on your webhost can be relatively fast, it’s not as instantaneous as a dedicated email provider. When you are having important client conversations through email, and you are waiting for responses from clients that don’t arrive until 5 minutes after they have pressed send, that slows down your business processes. Waiting minutes for an email can feel like hours when it’s an important topic or conversation. - Subpar calendar system
Scheduling and calendars are synonymous with email, and being able to book meetings and appointments that sync across all devices is crucial. The CPanel calendar options don’t provide this functionality without heavy modification or add-on use. The dedicated email servers I talk about below are coupled with calendar systems that can be shared easily and synced across all devices no problem. This makes sure you stay reliable with your customers, and attend meetings and appointments as promised. - Reliability and Uptime
This is one of the most important items on this list. When an email server is more of an afterthought (as per the servers offered through your web hosting) that’s going to affect the reliability and uptime of your web server. While they are mostly reliable, I’ve had emails not show up here and there when using CPanel email servers, and something like that can lead to lost revenue and lost customers. Dedicated services like Google Workspace guarantee 99.9% uptime on their email and calendar services. - Outdated interfaces
The web interfaces that CPanel offers, such as RoundCube, are hilariously outdated and extremely clunky to use. I’m actually a little shocked they haven’t updated these services in the past few years. If you are used to using Gmail or Outlook web interfaces, the ones that CPanel provides just won’t cut it. There are ways around it, such as adding POP3 and IMAP accounts to an already created Gmail or Outlook account, but then your mail starts to become a disorganized and messy being connecting to a Gmail account that isn’t associated with your business.
With all that said, using your web hosting to also host your email, while there being many downsides, still can work in a pinch if you need it.
Dedicated Email Servers
Dedicated email servers are a much better and recommended approach to hosting your custom email address. There are many dedicated email service providers, and I’ll leave it to you to Google them all to decided which email service might best fit your needs, but the most known ones are Google Workspace and Microsoft Exchange.
These platforms are dedicated to providing the best email service, as opposed to being more of a side thought with CPanel email hosting. These custom email providers solve basically all of the issues that I’ve outlined in the previous section, and the only downside of them being that there is a monthly cost. But if you have a minimal user base, those monthly costs are pretty minimal.
With Google Workspace or Microsoft Exchange, you get excellent reliability and uptime, integrated calendar systems that sync across users and devices, and an email service that is decoupled from your web hosting.
Deciding between Google Workspace and Microsoft Exchange is more of a subjective choice, as it often comes down to whether you or your users have a history of using Microsoft products as opposed to more open source type products. But they are both great solutions.
Why This Matters to Small Businesses
While as a small business, you may be looking to cut costs where ever you can, your email communication is a key identifier for your business and sets the tone of how you offer your services and communicate with your customers. If you aren’t able to provide speedy responses, if your email goes down, even for a short amount of time, customers will start to get the impression that you are unreliable. Put your best foot forward when it comes to your business email, and spend a small amount of money to setup a dedicated email server separate from your website hosting.