Your email system is like a mouth for your business. Now imagine when your email experiences downtime, that would be like losing a mouth when your business needs to talk in times of urgency. That meaning a reliable email hosting is definitely a significant consideration for anyone who is serious with his/her business.

Imagine you work for a multinational company that has a great office environment, you present yourself professionally and you then hand over your name card to your client and the email address reads as ‘david@hotmail.com’. What would the client think of you and the company? Not as impressive as I thought if I’m the client. So it’s not just about having a reliable email hosting. It’s also about the overall ‘package’. It’s about your business identity. For a multinational company that has a large number of users, an email hosting would also have greater control over user access.

Clients are going to perceive company’s who possess their personal email domain to have more credibility than those who don’t. It helps to build branding and credibility. Furthermore, it gives better visibility on the internet and make your company more searchable by others with better SEO. In short it simply gives a better representation of your business

When dealing with free email service, you risk losing your email if it is not used or accessed regularly. Many free email service company have a policy of pruning accounts that have been inactive for months. In worst case, you don’t even receive any notification when your account is being terminated. In a paid email hosting service, you receive notification from time to time for a renewal and your email account would never be pruned for inactivity. Not to forget free email service works like free web hosting, that are ads imposed.

Most free email services are web-based, this means you will be required to open your internet browser when you want to check or send your email which can be rather troublesome for people who just wants to instantly run through some old email messages. Unlike this limited web-based use, a paid email hosting allows you to integrate your email to other software e.g. Outlook. This makes everything more convenient, especially when you face downtime of Internet. Furthermore, you’ll also get backups of emails that you don’t usually get in free email service.

But aside from all these, the significance for anyone to choose a paid email service is about the confidentiality. You may not be aware of what you’ve signed up in your free email service, but if you do spend some reading the terms and conditions of the usage, you’ll realize that some points did mentioned that the email provider have the rights to dig into your messages for documentation or research purposes. It is not uncommon for such intrusive practice, but if you do read some free services you will realize how your confidentiality can be violated. Having said that, it is imperative for you to choose a reliable email hosting provider if you communicate anything that is sensitive and confidential to your business.