Archive for July 19, 2013

Should you do a In-House email hosting or choose Hosted Email Provider?

When you only have a handful of employees, the costs involved in deploying a full-scale email system can seem prohibitive. However, as your business continues to grow, the practice of email management can place a strain on several areas including communication, functionality and overall security. Once you have come to the place where you have completely outgrown free email services, you will be left with two choices: You can either manage your email locally, or you can utilize a hosted email provider. Below are some important points to consider when determining which one will be the best step for your thriving business.

Do you have the initial capital to set up an on-site email system?

The setup costs for on-site email systems can be excessive. The capital outlay needed to procure the necessary hardware, security features and licenses for an on-site system can run upwards of INR 1,00,000. Keep in mind that this is only the startup costs; you will also have to factor in routine maintenance and operating expenses such as security patches and software or server upgrades. Your hardware will need to be replaced once every three years on average, and that is not including any additional hardware you may be required to purchase to account for the growth of your business in the meantime. Now contrast the above scenario with a hosted email model. With a hosted email provider, you will have access to an all-inclusive email system within minutes, minus the extravagant capital outlay. You will have administrative access by way of a feature-rich control panel, which will help you manage all of your different mailboxes as well as control the various features of your email accounts. In addition, you can scale or build out at the drop of a hat without having to purchase or deploy additional hardware. Your hosting provider will also ensure that your email system is always up to date with the latest security patches and software upgrades, and can offer a level of security beyond what is available with on-site email systems.

Do have the ability to hire dedicated email systems personnel?

According to Indeed.com, the average salary for a Email Administrator is upwards of INR 5,00,000 per year. This investment in “human capital” will ensure that your email system will be properly managed, but your budget may not currently be able to sustain such an expense. You also have to consider the unpleasant “what-if” scenario of your administrator leaving, and you being stuck with trying to figure out how to “tread water” and manage your email system until you can find a satisfactory replacement. One of the biggest benefits of a hosted business email solution is the fact that the labor expenses for the IT personnel that will be maintaining the system is included in the price. This provides you with a knowledgeable team of subject matter experts that are able to keep tabs on every aspect of your email service. Enterprise email hosting  providers understand the mission-critical role that email administrators perform, so they take great pains to ensure that they only employ credentialed, well-versed and properly screened candidates.

Do you have a dedicated area for servers?

Email hosting servers require a secure, dedicated area to run with controlled access and some type of redundant power source. If you desire to manage your own email system, it is recommended that you consider utilizing dedicated server hosting from a data center. If you choose not to do this, you will need to consider where you’re going to store the hardware and how you’re going to keep it secure. The typical hosted email provider will house your email server for you in a large data center with high-level security. Email hosting providers usually offer backup services as well, including archiving options to assist with data loss prevention.

Do you need the ability to access your email remotely?

Integrating remote access and mobile support features such as Active Sync or BES (for Blackberry) into your on-site email solution will greatly increase your expenses as well. Using a mail server hosting provider will enable you to securely access your email server from anywhere in the world by way of your web browser. Mobile capabilities can also be added to your hosted solution for a flat monthly fee, enabling you to avoid costly licensing and startup costs.

If you experience an interruption in service, how quickly would your system be able to recover?

Email servers face constant threats by way of power surges, malicious software attacks, and illegal intrusions via hackers. Any one of these adverse conditions can cause severe delays in internal communications and response times, hindering overall productivity and negatively impacting your bottom line. Choosing to manage your email on-site may put you in a bind if you are not proficient in troubleshooting during high-pressure and time-sensitive situations. Corporate email hosting providers utilize efficient redundancy systems across several different data centers, allowing your email services to continue uninterrupted even during a localized network outage. Make sure to carefully examine a potential email provider’s uptime guarantee. Hosted email providers have the capability to continuously monitor the health and status of your email system, and can quickly deploy resources to diagnose or repair any issues as they arise.

Its best to have your business emails hosted with experts who understand how to manage and secure your valuable communication – our business email hosting provides true 100% uptime SLA, 99.999% spam free inbox and not to mention 25GB mailboxes with enterprise features. A more detailed brief can be viewed at here.

Our business email hosting is in fact even better than google apps and a quick comparison can be seen below. (a downloadable pdf can be found here.)

business email hosting vs google apps

Outgoing spam emails

Recently there has been many instances of server IP been blacklisted and/or inbox been flooded with bounce emails. Such instances are affecting thousands of web hosting companies in India and worldwide, below is the resolution for same.

Symptons:

– Lot of bounce emails, from emails IDs to whom you never sent emails

– Your valid outgoing emails are been rejected because of blacklisted IP

– Your valid outgoing emails are rejected with message that you have crossed outgoing email per hour limit.

Why this happens?

Your local PC/laptop where your email is configured is been infected with malware, your email login details are extracted and spammers go on sending outgoing emails from their own servers.

You will notice only outlook/email-client configured email accounts will face such issues because these details are stored on local machine.

Your anti-virus will not help much as it can’t remove malware.

Solutions:

– Install Microsoft Security Essentials on local machine where email account is configured. MSSE is free and can be downloaded from microsoft.com

– Change your email account password

You will now see in next few hours, outgoing spam issue is completely resolved.

Windows or Linux web hosting – which one to choose ?

The choice between Windows or Linux shared and reseller hosting India has always been a very complicated decision for potential customers who are seeking web hosting India services. In terms of pricing, Microsoft develops and owns its Windows operating system; therefore hosting a website on the Windows platform is more costly. On the other hand, Linux is an open-source operating system. In other words, in the majority of cases, Linux is a free operating system; reducing the costs of utilizing this platform. This price difference is relatively seen with dedicated servers India offering while for shared or reseller hosting, pricing are almost the same. Contrary to popular belief, it is important to clarify the fact that even if a customer is running a Windows operating system on his computer, he is still eligible to use Linux as a hosting platform.

It is imperative to understand that the most important factor in making a choice between both platforms is to know what functions a customer requires from his web hosting service. If a customer is seeking Microsoft’s proprietary features such as ASP, ASP.NET, Microsoft Access and Microsoft SQL Server then the Windows platform is an obvious choice.

In terms of stability, security and performance, both platforms are relatively equal. For this reason, it is important to rely mostly on the web hosting company’s server reliability. At YRHost, we offer state-of-the-art web hosting servers co-located in a reliable and secure data center.

9 Reasons To Avoid Unlimited Web Hosting


First, a quick history lesson

Web hosts limited monthly bandwidth and disk space in the late 90’s. During this period, web hosting was in its initial stages of being developed. Later, more hosts entered the web hosting market. However, only the hosts that offered more bandwidth and space stood out in this market. Most of these hosts offered unlimited accounts to their customers. Nevertheless, these unlimited accounts did not last long since their actual limits were a bit low. This was attributed to the slow progress of technology at that time.

Following this, hosts began to increase their limits since most customers did not embrace the idea of unlimited bandwidth and disk space. In fact, most of these customers considered this idea as a deceptive marketing scheme. As a result, hosts tried to overdo one another by offering higher limits. As time unfolded, the size of disk dramatically increased. For instance, Megabytes became Gigabytes that later became Terabytes. Later, Terabytes became Petabytes. Following this, hosts found it had to offer or use these limits.

1. The term unlimited hard drive does not exist

This is because the size of a hard drive can be physically limited. Therefore, at present unlimited hard drive does not exist. However, you may do an in-depth research and create this type of disk in the future. Limited hard drives allow you to serve, upload, or store limited data. You may have a SAN (Storage Area Network) where you may keep adding as many drives as you wish. However, this does not change the fact that unlimited hard drive does not exist, in the present century.
It is hard to determine or understand what the actual limits are Hosts that claim to be unlimited have limits in place. You may not be able to recognize these limits since they are either vaguely defined in their Terms of Service (TOS) or shrouded in secrecy in an often manner. If your site is shut off, cancelled, broken, or throttled, then you should recognize that your host has limits in place. You can never be the next Facebook in your 400 rupees per month unlimited hosting account!

2. Severe restriction of the number of files that you can store or inode limit

Most hosts that claim to offer unlimited services will allow you to store a maximum of 25,000 files in your account. Most people do not recognize such limit until they exceed it. You can no longer upload new files when you exceed the inode limit. You can easily exceed the inode limit; especially if you are working on an ecommerce site that has lots images. Other sites that easily exhaust the inode limit include sites that have many images per image for resized pictures.

3. Poor, rare or total failure to do backups

Large consumption of disk space occurs when a host offers you unlimited space for a low price. As a result, the host finds it exceedingly hard and expensive to create and carry out reliable and regular backups for your huge amounts of data. Lack of proper maintenance of backups by your host may make you lose your database, even if you have backups for your files.

4. Long restoration period

Researches show that most restore or backup applications restore data at the rate of 50 GB for every one hour. This rate is a bit slow especially if you need to restore a large volume of data. For instance, you may take 2 to 4 days to fully restore data if your host has a server with 4,000 GB of data that need to be restored.

5. Large storage requirements make hardware to be less reliable

You should be careful with hosts that claim to offer unlimited space at low price. This is because the hardware that supports their unlimited space is often of lower quality than high end drives that support Terabytes of space. Less reliable systems are often caused by lower quality hardware. You can solve this problem by embracing the use of RAID setups with multiple drives; however, this increases the chances of losing your data and down time.

6. High restriction on the type of your content by TOS

Hosts that claim to offer unlimited space have hidden tricks to limit you on the amount of content that you can store in your account. Such tricks may be in form of restrictions that are worded in a careful manner. These restrictions are often in terms of service agreements that you agree to when signing up. One of such restrictions may require you to agree to the fact that all video or audio must be created by the site owner.

7. You may be exposed to black lists since most unlimited accounts attract unsavory characters

Most unlimited hosts attract all sorts of people including individuals that host illegal videos, music, or software, and webmasters. Therefore, you stand a risk of being at close vicinity with these kinds of people if you use these unlimited accounts. This may land or expose you to instability and downtime since some of these hosts have a high likelihood of being blocked.

8. You may be attracted to false advertisement

Most hosts that claim to offer unlimited space do not often deliver what they advertise. Most notably, these hosts offer more restrictions than hosts with reasonable limits do. False advertisements cause huge amounts of harm to the hosting industry. This is because many customers get confused since they do not know what to do or not do with their sites. This is disgusting since if you want to have a trustworthy and long-lasting relationship with your customers, then you ought to be honest with them.

9. Most unlimited web hosts focus on specs and not service and support

The quality of services and supports, rather than the amount of space, which a host offers to its customers is what matter most. However, most unlimited web hosts do not focus on the quality of service and support they offer to their customers and consumers. In fact, the chief goal of these hosts is to fish out some money from your pockets and make profits!

Our advise: Go for web hosting companies in India that clearly define whats included with a hosting plan. Web Hosting India has companies that are honest and upfront with their resources in their hosting plan.


Follow Us
We Accept
We accept Indian credit cards, debit cards and net banking payments
Copyright © 2014 YRHost Solutions (P) Limited. All Rights Reserved