Email is the mainstay of inter-office and intra-office communication for most organizations globally. Most formal and official communication for businesses is done via email. Accepted worldwide as the gold standard for communication and sending legal documentation, email is the backbone of the communication system for every business.

Free email providers dominate the email world. Gmail, iCloud email and outlook.com are major players that send most of the email communication worldwide. However, for a business, an email is much more than a string of letters.

Business email—credibility begins with the domain

Every legitimate business requires a domain name that corresponds with its company name. For example, team email addresses at Pack Web hosting end with @packwebhosting.com. This makes your email seem to be more trustworthy, professional and makes people take you seriously.

The top 5 reasons to create your email server

Although there are dozens of reasons to create and set up your cloud email server, here are the top 3 reasons why businesses choose to set up their mail server:

1. Privacy – You can set up custom privacy controls to ensure that the privacy of your email server is optimal. In short—you’re in charge of your privacy.
2. Security – Your email sending and receiving policies will ensure the highest levels of security, ensuring that your team stays safe from spam.
3. Reliability – Your emails are always delivered—ensuring that your business is always online and has little to no downtime.
4. Brand recognition – Your email is your business card. You can tailor your email to reflect your brand in the best possible way. Customers can easily reach the intended department in your company with emails such as service@yourdomain.com or marketing@yourdomain.com or individuals such as sales.manager@yourdomain.com.
5. Functionality – As you run and configure your email server, you can add or remove functionality as per need. Your email server is highly configurable and can be set to suit your business needs.

How do I get a business email with my domain?

Setting up a business email for your domain is easy. All you need to do is buy a domain name, configure your email server, and you’re good to go! Most leading VPS hosting providers, such as Pack Web Hosting, will offer you pre-configured email hosting when purchasing a hosting plan. However, some businesses also like to segregate their email and web hosting. In such cases, you may want to host your business email on our VPS email servers.

What are the various types of email hosting servers?

There are three major types of email hosting servers. These include:

1. Shared email hosting and web hosting – Most shared hosting plans offer web and email hosting in one account. All resources, including space, bandwidth and processing power, are shared with other customers hosted on the same server.
2. Self-hosted email – If you have your servers, you can host email yourself instead of going to a third-party provider. Self-hosting offers many advantages, including total control and customizability, but you have to maintain your servers and manage your email policies.
3. Third-party email hosting and VPS email hosting – If you need a fully-featured email service but do not know the nuances of setting an email server up yourself, third-party email hosting is the best way out for you. Third-party email hosting or VPS email hosting will help you get as much control as with self-hosted email, without the costs of putting up email servers and securing power supply and bandwidth along with the costs of admins to manage them.

What do I need to host my business email?

This is the easy bit. A reliable web and email hosting provider such as Pack Web Hosting will have all you need to start hosting your business email.

Business email needs a domain name (such as example.com) to set up email IDs (such as myname@example.com). You can buy your domain from Pack Web Hosting at highly competitive rates. Additionally, you will need an email server to host your emails. This can either be a dedicated server if your email volume is very high or a VPS server.

What is VPS email hosting?

Some basics to help you get up to speed. VPS hosting is a high-speed, high-bandwidth and secure email hosting system that provides agility, security and scalability. A VPS or virtual private server is an isolated server instance that runs within a dedicated server. Resources allocated to a VPS client are not shared with others, making it more cost-efficient than a dedicated server while offering the same benefits. VPS email hosting involves setting up an email server on a VPS hosting service, giving your email server the same speed, agility, security and reliability as VPS web hosting.

What features should I look for while choosing a third-party email hosting solution?

Although most email hosting companies such as Pack Web Hosting provide you more features than you need, you must ensure the following before zeroing down on a provider:

• Custom domain name: You must be able to create email addresses with your domain name.
• Support: If you do not have your staff managing your server, your provider must provide you with world-class email server support.
• Security and spam management: Your server must have spam and virus filtering systems built-in so that you can send emails with confidence.
• Mailbox storage size: Your team and you should have enough storage, so discuss server storage capacity and mailbox size beforehand so that your employees have enough space.
• Sending size limits: Ensure that your provider has industry-standard sending size limits so that you can easily send emails to your clients.

How do I configure my email server?

Your email hosting provider will configure your email server. Please note that email server configuration is a complex administrative task that requires skill and experience. Do not experiment on your live server, as you might lose access to your server or end up not being able to send emails.

Here are some common configuration tasks that must be accomplished for an email server to ensure deliverability:

Authentication via DNS records

Most email servers require the implementation of TXT records. Email servers use these records at the time of email delivery. Here is a summary of these records:

• Setting up the SPF or sender policy framework – SPF records allow you to create a policy that lists authorized senders. The server of your recipient will authenticate only those on the SPF record list as legitimate senders. Senders who are not in SPF records are marked as spam.
• Setting up DKIM records – DKIM or DomainKeys Identified Mail is a digital signature and verifies that the contents of your email have not changed during transit. This preserves the integrity of your email and prevents the forgery of the From address while sending emails.
• Configuring DMARC records – DMARC, or Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance records, specify the handling of emails without valid SPF and DKIM records. DMARC is used by many providers such as Gmail, Yahoo and many others.

Modifying your server’s hostname

Often, VPS email hosting providers use generic hostnames such as vpsclientname.packwebhosting.com. This hostname is the name of your email server. You must ensure that your outgoing mail server’s hostname and PTR record matches. This also ensures successful email delivery.

Note: These configurations are for your information and must not be done without expert supervision.

Why choose VPS servers for email hosting?

VPS servers are fast, secure and highly scalable. This makes them an excellent choice for hosting email. If you are planning to host your business email, contact Pack Web Hosting for a quote today. Our systems administrators have years of experience managing small, medium and enterprise-grade email servers that are hosted with us. Contact us for a free quote today!