A common question our clients face is, “should I host my email and website together?” My answer is always an emphatic “no.” Having your email and website hosted on the same server may appear convenient, but creates a significant risk, not to mention significant hassle should you decide to change your web hosting provider. At any given time, servers are under constant threat, and having one go down that's hosting your email and website together can disrupt both your online presence and your communications.
SEE ALSO: Everything You Should Look For In a Website Hosting Provider
Website Hosting. Email Hosting. They Are Not The Same!
Websites change, hosting changes... however, your business email never changes, and as such should be treated as a separate asset and function of your business, entirely. Tying your email down with your website hosting can make for much complication and hassle-factor should anything need to change with your website hosting.
Cons Of Hosting Your Website And Email Together…
- If your website hosting moves, the “hassle-factor” to migrate your email with your website is significant and extremely inconvenient. In worse case, it can be costly if fees become part of the migration service.
- If your website hosting moves, and your email cannot be migrated with it, you loose all of your historical email communications.
- If your server goes down, so does your email and all ability to communicate via your domain based email accounts.
- Limited accessibility and configuration options.
- Limited features
Keeping Migrations Easy
When making updates or changing to another web hosting provider, you will have to update your DNS (Domain Name System) Records. A DNS acts like the internet’s phonebook, directing domain names to IP addresses and making them accessible to other computers. By having separate host for web and email, you would only have to update your A Records for your website and PRESTO! Because your email is hosted separately, and controlled by a separate MX Record, your entire website migration resolves without any interruption to your email services. If you have a separate host for your email, it is one less thing you have to worry about being affected if anything happens to your website.
Staying Connected
In the worst-case situation that your site goes down, you need the ability to communicate with your workers and clients during this downtime. If your server holds both your website and email accounts, you have interrupted the most effective line of communication.
The Benefits Of Exchange Email Hosting
While website hosts usually provide you with a basic email accounts, with basic functionality, it’s always best to host your email with a separate, reputable email-hosting provider. An email-hosting business like Rackspace offers a business-class infrastructure that gives you spam protection, anti-virus, mobile sync capabilities and more.
A professional exchange email-hosting gives you the ability to integrate your email services with Microsoft Outlook, Android and Apple mobile devices and your desktop computer. Another added benefit is having Outlook included with your services, which otherwise would cost you over $100 to purchase separately.
With an exchange email hosting provider, you gain more specialized services that are finely engineered to maintain a high rate of email delivery. This is a frequently overlooked aspect of an effective email host, but when you’re sending out emails, e-newsletters and other electronic communications, you want to ensure as many users receive your communications as possible, rather than your messaging ending up in spam/junk folders.
If you would like to learn more about web and email hosting services, contact us today.