# Mail server advice



## Afterdark (Jun 22, 2002)

I am assuming that some of you at small businesses may have come across the question of do you get a Windows SBS server and then use it's own Exchange to handle your mail, or do you get a standard Windows server and then use one of the ever increasing hosted Exchange services.

The issue seems to be that in case of the internet going down, or some sort of disaster strikes, a company can still keep functioning if it has access to email - staff with corporate Blackberrys for instance - which you could do with a hosted service. However, if you have your own mail server, you are stuffed.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Thanks.


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## Squashman (Apr 4, 2003)

You also have to factor in the Time, Money, Man Power & resources you are spending to have your own mail server. I am a firm believer that eventually everything will either be hosted in the Cloud through the web or your company will have its server hosted virtually in a server farm offsite. I work for one of the largest printing companies in the world. For many years our Mail servers have been hosted offsite and now the company has decided to move our mail to the cloud. We all have been migrated over to Google Apps.

Most of these cloud service companies have service level agreements guaranteeing you 99% uptime. If you don't get that service level you will receive a credit on your service invoice because of the downtime occurred by their service being down.

I am betting it is more likely that your ISP connection will go down before the Cloud service will go down.

Just my 2 cents.


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## Afterdark (Jun 22, 2002)

Good points. I think I am going the hosted route.

Thank you.


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## Rockn (Jul 29, 2001)

There are pluses and minuses to both sides of the equation. I personally would rather host my own as I like the control as well as the integration it gives you with your Windows Server and Active Directory, etc. The down side is all of the other management you need to do with SPAM and virus prevention and the associated cost. I like the hosted model to a point, but have not liked all of the features and hoops you have to jump through to get it to integrate with local infrastructure. I am sure MS will come to the point where your server can be hosted locally and there will be seemless integration to give you more choices out of the box.


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