By: Michael Diedrick on May 15, 2012
Who do you recommend to host email? Here’s an easy answer: Google. Now 10gb of space, excellent spam control, a tool designed for productivity, support for accessing your email via smartphones, mail clients and, of course, Google’s web interface. All this adds up to the most professional system we’ve seen, the system that any competitor will have to beat. Learn more after the break.
And the price? Free, up to 10 years. $50/year per user. Non-profit and education organizations are cheaper.
Pro tip: if you really need extra emails, you can ‘share’ an email address, like marketing@myorg.org and have two aliases, say: merideth@myorg.org and william@myorg.org and use filters to forward them to off-site gmail accounts.
What’s amazing to me is the IT firms who don’t recommend this as a solution to smaller non-profits. I wonder if this is a good litmus test if you’re interviewing IT firms -- ‘who do you recommend to host our email?’ If they don’t mention Google, they’re either out of touch or want to sell you an overpriced, highly managed Exchange server. Believe us, you probably don’t want that.
We’re technology agnostic -- if it works, we’re all about it. Cheap is an added bonus. We’re also technologically disparate -- keep each part of the puzzle with the people who do it best. So we don’t host email anymore, or DNS. We leave it to the experts.