It’s a surprise to me how many companies have websites these days. From the companies that run their business out of their home office, the hundreds of thousands of small businesses, all the way up to large corporations…they all have a website and utilize email for communicating with clients, vendors, and other employees within the company. At the same time, it still surprises me how many companies do not have a professional email account!

Email is the most prominent use of communicating with others in today’s business world. As such, you want to make sure that your email host has all the tools to keep you up and maintain support so you never have any problems with your email address.

I’m bringing this up because I’ve been researching companies that provide Microsoft Exchange hosting for SMBs. Most of my clients are small to medium sized businesses and many times they are lacking in enterprise-strength hosted IT. This is one of the areas of your business that you want to pay careful attention to because if things go down, your business will suffer. It’s not about finding the cheapest hosted IT, but the one that gives you the most valuable.

I’m checking out a company called Intermedia. The reason I’m looking more into their services is because they offer a 30-day free trial so you can really dig into their services and check their response time if you have any issues.

Whether you have a company website or not, they offer hosted Exchange so you can focus on more important things in your business and not worry about your email going down. Also, you won’t have to invest the thousands of dollars in purchasing the equipment and maintaining your own Exchange. Even if you have a full time IT guy, I’m sure there’s many other responsibilities you would rather have him work on than worrying about one of the most important aspects of your business.

Also, if you’re like me, you have your Blackberry on you most of the day so you can take phone calls and receive email when your away from the office. Intermedia offers wireless email support so you can receive all of your business email directly on your Blackberry or other email supported phone. I know that I bought my Blackberry specifically for the reason of receiving my email when I’m on the go.

Give your IT guy a break, and don’t worry about having your email go down when you choose to go with top notch email hosting providers. There are many other aspects of your business that would be better suited to focus on than email. Your business, and banking account, will thank you for it later.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Strategy, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.