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Hosting costs £60/year including one domain name, email, personal support and VAT.
Email Accounts
There are broadly two styles of email account that you are likely to encounter:
- free email services that are ad-sponsored
- fully-functional email accounts like that at work
We offer the fully functional accounts, which also have the benefit of being able to access them by a webmail interface.
What you get with our hosting
- unlimited Pop3/IMAP4 email accounts, just add one when you need another, each has 1Gb of storage (these are normal email accounts)
- unlimited email aliases, eg. philip@ and phillip@ forward incoming email to the account at phil@ so you don't miss anything
- auto-responders (changeable via the control panel or in webmail)
- works in Outlook and all major email programs with simple setup (we can walk you through)
- full webmail (works with mobiles too)
- email on your mobile like a blackberry, iphone or other smart phone (make sure though that you have an unlimited data contract on your phone)
POP3 and IMAP4?
These are types of email accounts, and the most common variety. This basically means the emails sit on a server waiting for you to interact with them.
Although there are some minor differences, essentially IMAP4 is the newer version of POP3 but your email accounts can be operated as either interchangeably. You either download the email completely (POP3) or you can view it on the server, add folders, and download when done (IMAP4).
In Reality
Depending on what you like to use, we tend to recommend using IMAP4 because it gives you the greatest flexibility. For example you could view your email in the following ways simultaneously:
- at the office in Outlook, with them instantly updating (no need to click Send/Receive)
- at home on your Mac in Mail
- on your iPhone/BlackBerry, also with instant updating
- in a web browser
What about Microsoft Exchange?
We find that clients requiring this level of hosting tend to be 20 people or less and either already have an in-house system (which we can interface with) or be only a few people.
If necessary we can help set up a hosted exchange service, though the cost tends to be a minimum of £5 per month per mailbox (the same cost as our hosting, domain and support combined!) and unless you really use all the features of exchange then it can be expensive.
There are also some free alternatives, for example Google Calendar Sync allows you to merge calendars online with other users (all our web clients use Google accounts) and indeed the webmail allows allows a simpler calendar sync option.
