Four Reasons Why Your Company Website & Email Should be Hosted Separately

It’s important for business owners to understand that their website and email are two different business systems, which need to be managed independently. For most businesses, a website is primarily for marketing the business with perhaps some operational or sales elements. While email is almost exclusively operational allowing your team to communicate and do their jobs. Occasionally we come across businesses who use the email service supplied by their website host provider. This common practice should be avoided if possible. When you host your email on the same server as your website, you face the following potential problems:

1. Basic Features: Email services provided by web hosting companies are very basic, often with minimal features, inadequate storage, and poor spam control. Most businesses need more than the basics. Make sure your email provider offers all of the features you need and allows you to sync email across your devices with enough storage space so that you don’t have to worry about regularly deleting your email history.

2. Server Resources: In the event your email gets spammed or your website gets flooded by traffic, you don’t want one system slowing down or preventing the other from working. Furthermore, we don’t want our clients who have bad email practices (i.e. posting their email address on numerous websites and receiving a substantial amount of spam) slowing down the web server. Keeping these two systems separate allows your web service provider and IT services provider to work independently on issues that are consuming your servers’ resource without negatively impacting each other.

3. Security: Websites are public facing and often use open-source technology. So, it’s imperative to recognize there are people who make a shady living from hacking websites. It’s unlikely that someone could hack a website and get access to your email. But in the unlikely event that a website does get hacked, the IP address for that server can be blacklisted for a period of time. If your email is using that same IP address, your email may become blocked by Google, Microsoft and all of the other mail servers worldwide. Purely for risk mitigation, you need your email server to be on a separate IP address (i.e. separate server).

4. Support: The main thing to remember is that your email is a business system that is essential to your operations. To ensure you never miss an email, it is important to have full control over your email, which includes 24/7 support 365 days a year. Most web hosts are not equipped to deal with email issues across all of the different computers and devices in the market today. So make sure your email support is 100% dedicated and that your website support is focussed on their responsibility of keeping the website up and running.

Email Support

Yardstick Services does not employ the technical skills to troubleshoot all of the email issues businesses have with their various email programs and devices; this is the realm of IT professionals. We’ve written this article to educate and inform our own customers as much as the general public.

So, if you have any email challenges look to Rackspace, Google Apps, or Office 365 for the most commonly used business email solutions amongst our small business clients. Larger businesses will need to consult with an IT professional or Managed Services company.

If you’re having challenges with website security, backups, or maintenance, we want to talk to you. If you have any questions or are looking for support, please feel free to comment below, send an email or give us a call: 604.474.3631