Despite the rise of instant messengers and video chat applications in the past several years, emails are still the main channel of online communication. Billions of messages are being sent every day as emails are used for both personal and business communication. When it comes to finding a good and reliable email service, many people turn to enterprise email solutions provided by large corporations. Even if their web hosting company offers an email service, they sometimes host only their website there, while they use a third-party email provider.
If you use a cloud site builder that doesn’t offer any email service, your only choice is to use a different provider. If you have a standard hosting plan that includes emails, though, should you still prefer a third-party email provider, or can you use the email service of your hosting provider? In this article, we will explore whether the email service of your web hosting provider can compete with that of large email providers. We will not compare common features like disk space or number of emails you can send, as they are easy to see on the providers’ websites. Instead, we will look at different aspects of the service that people rarely consider, and we will show you why the service your hosting provider offers may actually be better.
1. Privacy
We start with privacy as it has been a great concern for lots of people lately. Some of the most popular providers offer email among other services and for one reason or another, they often scan the messages. Whether they do it to show you relevant ads or to add your next flight to your calendar automatically, it is a fact that they go through the content of all your emails. Not only that, but they can also use the information they receive from your emails to personalize other services they offer. Even if this is done by a machine, you have to rely on a large corporation to decide who can go through your content.
If you have a web hosting plan and you use it to host your emails, you will not have to worry about privacy as hosting providers do not scan emails. The reason is simple – they have no interest in doing that. You already use their services and they have no need to promote any other products by scanning your emails. Even if they offer you some upgrade, it would be based on your resource usage, not email content.
Our Roundcube Webmail client comes with a message encryption feature, which you can enable with a few clicks. Once the feature is active, you will be able to encrypt both text and attachments with a unique private key. Only people you trust will be able to read your messages, so you will not have to worry about privacy. Any unauthorized party that intercepts an encrypted message will see only scrambled letters and numbers.
2. Support
Large email providers have tens of millions of users (we don’t even count the number of free users). Due to this huge customer base, it is difficult to provide adequate support – the sheer number of support requests can be overwhelming. This is why they usually offer lots of help articles and make it quite hard to find an actual way to contact them. Even if you do find how to submit your inquiry, you may have to wait for hours, or even days to receive a reply. If there is some problem with your business emails, such a response time will be quite unsuitable.
You may believe that a paid email service will receive priority support and if you experience any problem, it will be resolved before any issues that free users experience. We looked at the services offered by one of the largest email providers and it turns out that you will receive standard support with 4-hour response time even with their high-end plans. Faster priority support will cost you extra, although you are already paying for each email account you create.
In comparison, any decent web hosting provider will reply promptly and at no additional cost. Of course, some providers have quite a long response time as well, but we assume that you already have an account with some company and you are familiar with their response time. If you already host your website and you are happy with the level of support you receive about the site, you can surely trust that company with your emails as well.
The highly qualified ICDSoft support team has a guaranteed response time of 15 minutes and an average response AND resolution time of only 7 minutes. You will not have to pay anything extra to receive support and your request will be handled by an experienced senior-level support person right from the start.
3. Calendar
Calendars are not directly related to emails, but they are integrated into the email service of some of the largest providers. This way, you can have your personal or business communication and a list of upcoming events in one place. The integration between emails and calendars is one of the reasons why people often prefer to use an enterprise service. They are more productive and they can schedule their days better if everything they need is just a couple of clicks away. A task list is often available as well, albeit as a separate app that usually opens in a new browser tab.
The webmail clients that some hosting providers offer often feature a calendar that can easily compete with the calendar of any enterprise email provider. You can still have all the perks, such as setting up a reminder for a particular event, creating multiple calendars and sharing one or a few of them with other people, or adding details such as location or privacy for an event. One advantage of using a calendar with your web hosting provider is that tasks are usually integrated directly in the calendar, so you will not have to use a separate app or browser tab just for tasks.
Even if the webmail application your hosting company uses does not have a calendar, you can use a desktop program like Thunderbird or some mobile email application for your phone/tablet, which includes a calendar by default, without the need to install any addons. Unlike enterprise email providers, it will not add your next flight or cinema tickets to the calendar automatically. Do not forget, however, that for such a thing to happen, all your emails are constantly being monitored, albeit by a machine.
We offer a feature-rich calendar with all our hosting plans and it is a part of the Roundcube webmail client that we use. With a few clicks, you can easily create different calendars and share them with read and/or write permissions and create one-time or repeating events. You can also add tasks and track their completion in the same place, without loading a separate application.
4. Application clutter
As we mentioned earlier, enterprise email providers actually offer email services among a number of other services. This is why you will find various options on the same page as your emails – links/buttons to instant messengers, text editors, and video conferencing applications are a few examples of the things you will find all around your correspondence. If you use a lower-end service, you may even see ads and reminders to upgrade your email plan or to add some feature. If you decide to change some setting, you may have a hard time doing so, because email options are often listed along various other options concerning all other services you may or may not have with that particular provider.
If you choose to have your emails with your web hosting provider, you will see none of the above clutter. With a standard hosting plan, emails are just emails, not a showcase for additional services that you probably don’t even need. You can use a webmail client from your hosting provider with a clean and user-friendly interface. If you need file sharing, document collaboration, or video conferencing, you can use a free solution like Nextcloud and enjoy these services while you keep your emails separate.
If you need a reliable video conferencing application, but you prefer not to use the services of large corporations, you can use the video service we offer for free. You will find it in the ICDSoft Account Panel that is used to manage all services you have with our company.
5. Cost
If you have a personal website or you run a small company, you are probably on a tight budget. If this is the case, and you pay for a web hosting account, you may as well use the email service your hosting provider offers. Emails are a part of any standard web hosting service (we are not talking about cloud site builders here), so you will not have to pay anything extra to be able to create and use mailboxes with your domain name. Depending on your plan, you may have some limit for the number of mailboxes, but even in such a case, you will be able to create more than enough mailboxes for your venture.
Enterprise email providers usually charge per user/mailbox and the price for a single email address can often be higher than the price of your web hosting plan. If you need a few mailboxes, the overall cost may become too much for your budget. This is why you should consider using the email service of your hosting provider. Unless you need some additional service/feature from that provider, which you cannot use with your web hosting plan, there is no point to pay an additional price just to be able to use email addresses with your domain name.
In conclusion
If you want to create email addresses with your domain name, usually there are two options – you can use the email service included in your web hosting plan, or you can purchase a separate email package from an enterprise provider. When people choose, they often look at the mailbox size and the additional services that come with the emails, even if they don’t really need them. Sometimes, however, they forget to look at what is beyond the features listed on the provider’s home page.
If you simply need an email service without any additional services such as document editors or video presentation software, there is no point to pay extra money if you already have such a service included in your web hosting plan. If you use the services of a decent hosting provider, you will not have to worry about the privacy of your emails, the lack of quick support, or the increasing costs every time you want to create a new mailbox.
