Your business needs email servers. You need email accounts. You need to be in constant contact with your employees, clients, providers, customers and the public in general and emails are the most commonly used way of doing business communication today. Without a robust emailing system you might as well be running your business in the dark.

One of the more popular email solutions comes from tech giant Microsoft: the Microsoft Exchange Server. It is one of the most widely used email server solutions on the planet today and it can be both implemented locally on your network or remotely as a hosted solution.

Below we will see the advantages and disadvantages of signing up for a hosted Exchange Server:

Advantages

1. There is no initial cost. When you opt for a hosted Exchange solution you are ridding yourself of the costs of purchasing servers, implementing a connectivity solution, buying the software packages, investing in personnel, overhead… in short: a long list of expenses.

With this option, you pay a relatively lower price and start using your email server in matter of hours.

2. When you sign up for hosted Exchange you are passing all the headaches that come with the running and managing of an email server on to the service provider. All the patching, updating, maintaining and tweaking is undergone by them. All you need to do is use the service and ask for modifications, or support, should you find something not up to par.
3. You and your colleagues are instantly connected to the world and you can access your email, contacts, calendars and other productivity apps from anywhere on the planet using almost any decent mobile device.
4. Accessing your email using mobile devices means that there is an increased risk of losing your device. Unlike in the normal LAN Exchange- to-device connection, the hosted one has an additional and very advantageous feature: “remote device wipe”. In case your mobile device is lost or stolen, that is exactly what you will be able to do – wipe off all the data on it. Everything including your emails, applications, photos and personal information will be wiped clean.
5. Should your business grow substantially or your email requirements increase over time, you can rest assured that this will not affect you drastically. Just like any hosted solution, your hosted Exchange can also be easily scaled upwards for your convenience. This will also be done transparently, so you won’t even feel the effects during the transformation process.

Disadvantages

1. If you are a stickler when it comes to control over all your servers – be they big or small – then this probably want be your cup of tea. You might not like the idea of someone else physically being around your server (be it a physical or a virtual one) without your direct permission. And even if you know that all your email and data is encrypted, you still can’t sleep at night without having a suspicious feeling that someone is accessing it all then this is probably not the solution for you.
2. If you have lots of email being exchanged between yourself and your colleagues and if you expect the emails to reach their destined addresses in the shortest amount of time (which is instantly), then you will not like this solution. You have to remember that, although you may be sitting across the table from the intended recipient, your email will have to first travel to the hosting provider and then be routed back to the addressee. It can be quite annoying if there is a lot of email correspondence going on in your business as the lag time will increase over time.
3. If you want to run your email on hosted Exchange, you will need to increase your internet bandwidth. This is especially true if there is a lot of email back-and-forth going on: the more emails that are exchanged, the larger your bandwidth is going to be.
4. Remember when we talked about how one of the advantages of choosing hosted Exchange was the ability for you and your colleagues to access your email and accounts from anywhere in the world? Well, that strong point is also its weak point: if you happen to live in an area where the internet is intermittent or is down for days, just waiting to send or receive an email could drive you up a wall and play havoc with your nerves.

When the internet is down, so is your email communication.

5. Support might not be forthcoming as quickly as you might require it. Only you and your colleagues can know what it means when something happens to your communication and how it will affect your business.

If you have to rely on the hosting provider’s support to handle issues, you will need to able to make them understand the urgency of your situation and how it needs to be resolved in the shortest possible time (yesterday). Otherwise, you will probably be just another client in a long support ticket queue.