Use an email address with your domain name or company name? Advantages and Disadvantages
The choice of a professional email address for businesses have often been a headache for both the client and the server administrators – (the persons who manages your web server**).
Managing emails with your domain name
Emails and domain names can be managed in various ways. You can for instance get:
A “free” company email* from a third party company
In free we mean the Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo account that you had since you started a small business such as masterbuilders@gmail.com, or even worse a name followed by numbers (john1235@yahoo.co.uk) Yes this is a very bad practice. You also get all sorts of targeted advertising (display of a advert following your interests, or webpages previously visited). They will attract potential clients by offering lots of space. Also as a Cloud Based** solution, you have to make sure than the company is doing the job right (data privacy issues)
A custom domain name, but still with a third party company
For a paid membership, Gmail would for instance allow you to use your own domain name and give you a few Gigabytes of data. While this seems quite appealing and a much better solution than the free email address, you could be facing a big issue regarding your data privacy and the privacy of your contacts (you could read Google Mail Terms and Conditions regarding data privacy).
However as a business owner, you should keep your branding together, enjoy the benefits of using a professional email address with your own domain name (john@masterbuilders.co.uk), and along with the full privacy of your data.
A hosting company, with your own domain name on a shared server.
What does that mean? You have a hosting company (1and1, 123-reg, etc). They would sell you a subscription based email (weekly / monthly payments). While it sounds great on paper, make sure that your emails are not on one of their shared servers, where more than 30.000 other accounts, web, emails are stored. Those servers are slow, and a hacker could have access to it easily by hacking a less secure website on the webserver. Still following?
What is the best email setup for a business?
It all depends of the size of your business.
If you own an insurance company, you would need to send and receive thousands of email every day. You might need two or three powerful dedicated email web servers (if one of the server fails *** you can revert to the second server, and so on). You also need a powerful backup solution, that can restore your data quickly.
For more corporate solutions and full control over your data, you could (or should) use your own in-house server with your own system administrator(s).
On a smaller scale, if you own a building company with 10-15 employees, averaging 100 emails a day for instance, you might want to get one dedicated server, or if budget is an issue, just use the server where your website is stored.
Smaller companies with less than 5 employees should consider using a professional shared server,
If you need advice on what solution is better depending on your company, just send us an email(!) we would be happy to help.
* Sorry to break it up to you, but nothing is really free on your emails. While you don’t pay a dime for it, you give complete access to your data, which is very valuable for those companies. They can for instance deliver targeted advertising, or sell your data to other partner companies for instance.
** The “Cloud” is just someone else’s computer. A “web server” is also “just” a computer, online for 24/7 and accessible on the internet.
*** As mentioned above, a web server is a computer. While they are built to last, hardware sometimes fail. As a business owner you don’t want to learn that the hard way.
