Hosted Exchange. A good alternative to an in-house Email server.

The company I work for have just implemented a Hosted exchange solution. We decided to go with a Hosted solution after realising just how much it would cost to purchase a replacement server, not to mention the software costs that go with it. I saved a lot of money by moving to a Hosted Email server that I felt the service deserved an article.

Being honest, cost had a lot to do with it. The cost of the hardware alone would have been nearly 2K and that was with skimping on additional RAM and extra storage space. Then there was the cost of software with Exchange 2007 weighing in at nearly £500.00 plus the costs involved in order to updates everyone’s version of outlook, to summarise we would be looking at roughly £5000.00 to upgrade our email server.

The prices above are the main reasons we started looking for an alternative. The first thing we thought of was to go back to the old way of working with Pop3 accounts, it certainly is a cheap way of implementing email but the functionality we required wasn’t there. So we did some research and found a company that were advertising hosted email servers at “a fraction of the cost compared to an in-house exchange server”.

I am a very sceptical person, I believe that if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is and initially I felt this way about “Hosted services” but as the initial trial was free I decided to give it a go...

To my surprise, the service actually worked! Initially I was using the service over webmail during the trial, but the functionality was excellent. We were allowed to use our domain name for the trial so we actually got to use the system on a day to day basis. Everything we needed was there; we could share calendars, contacts and public folders (which is very important for us) plus we could access our email through the webmail from home which was even better for the MD.

After a month’s trial we decided to go full time with Hosted Exchange and we have never looked back. Another pleasant surprise was the fact that every user was entitled to a free copy of outlook 2007 with the service, once everyone installed their copy we were up and running in no time.

I have wrote this hub to make people aware that there is a way you can implement a proper email solution for your business without the need for purchasing expensive hardware and software. If you run a small business like mine then budgets can be tight at the best of times, especially in this current climate so any savings you can make are welcome. The best thing of all was the fact that we actually improved our email system while saving costs. If you do your research then you should find that most companies that provide this service won’t actually charge you any upfront costs as well.

Anyway, Hosted Exchange gets my blessing; all I need to do now is find someone that can host my entire network!!

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Hosted Exchange Company we ended up using. We are very happy with the service and it is definitely a good way to save money.