By Hostway
Get more value from your shrinking IT budget by outsourcing your routine server maintenance tasks and reallocating your staff to focus on adding value to your business. With hosted Web solutions, you can outsource without sacrificing quality or performance.
One of the most common causes of trouble, email can consume a large portion of your IT staff's attention. Spam floods and email crashes can slow down servers and take hours to fix.
When you use a hosted email solution, your email accounts reside on a server housed and maintained by a hosting company with certified professionals on staff to prevent and handle outages and down time. Your Web host also handles any software updates, patches and installations.
Hosted email solutions are typically available as POP3 accounts or hosted Microsoft Exchange.
- POP3 accounts—These accounts give you the professional credibility of using your domain name in your email address, and they're inexpensive. POP3 accounts are typically included with Web hosting plans, but are sometimes offered as a stand-alone plan as well.
- Hosted Microsoft Exchange—With more functionality than POP3 accounts, Microsoft Exchange is one of the most common email system used by larger businesses. Hosted Exchange accounts give you all the functionality large corporations love, including anywhere access to email, shared documents and calendars and more at a fraction of the cost of maintaining the system yourself.
Hosted Microsoft SharePoint
Like hosted Microsoft Exchange, hosted SharePoint solutions give small businesses the same functionality big businesses use at a fraction of the cost. SharePoint is an internal Web site where your employees can work together, and you can easily track budgets, handle absence requests and more.
An in-house SharePoint solution requires a dedicated server. By outsourcing the server and maintenance, you cut the costs of staff time, housing and software installation and updates. At the same time, you get all the efficiencies a company intranet provides.
Dedicated Servers
Because your server holds information critical to your business, you need to protect it in a secure location and ensure continuous power and regular data backups. For a small business, the cost can be overwhelming.
Dedicated server hosting eliminates the infrastructure and start up costs because your Web host already owns and operates secure data centers. Even better, you get to choose the level of support you want. Dedicated server plans run from fully managed and maintained servers to colocation services where you place your server in the host's data center, but do all of the management yourself.
All of these solutions give you a fixed plan price and eliminate the high start-up costs of implementing the system yourself. And they carry predictable price tags, making your budgeting job easier.