Hosting a Exchange Server for Small Business

If you are planning to deploy Microsoft Exchange Server for your company, you should know the following best options for your company.

Self hosted Exchange

Self hosted exchange is expensive, therefore an efficient Microsoft Exchange environment needs dedicated Active Directory domain Controllers and dedicated Exchange server environment. All servers must be licensed. Just hardware and support can cost you approximate $ 5000 in licensing alone.

The equipments mentioned here are just the building blocks of your e-mail system. There are further other components missing from the configuration, which may include necessary for Anti-Virus, internet connectivity, data backup and support and maintenance.

Shared Hosted Exchange

There are several companies those have their own Microsoft Exchange Server infrastructures, capable of supporting thousand of users. Web hosting companies offer a simple solution for single users as well as small businesses to host Exchange email. You can easily avail their services for a flat fee without undergoing the hassles of setting up or maintaining every things on your own.

A single user or a small organization immediately takes advantages. Most hosting companies offer access to services like Blackberry Enterprise Server.

Shared Hosted Exchange has few drawbacks

There are hundreds of specialized management utilities available for Exchange and Active Directory, all of which are off limits to shared hosted customers. Single Sign-on is another feature for Exchange Server that is unavailable to shared hosted customers and an integration login feature for the users of Exchange server is also unavailable, user’s login using their Active Directory user account and this account is also used to access their email system. That means that a single login, a single password, gives them access to all of their applications. This integration is not possible with shared hosted exchange.

The best web hosting companies also provide simplifies management of your Exchange environment so that you get all the functionality and flexibility from your email and collaboration tools without spending too much time, effort, and cost. These hosting companies also provide Anti-Virus, backups and mobile email at the most cost effective rates.