Almost any hosting deal normally includes some sort of email solution. However, with email hosting you will get functions, an all supporting service and features you didn’t even know existed. Get anti-virus and anti-spam protection. Get email hosting that supports POP3, IMAP, SMTP. Find the best web mail interfaces with easy and quick access to all your domain email account.

For many businesses setting up a website and looking for proper web hosting, a good email solution is very important since much of today’s customer communication goes through email. But even as a private website owner, having a user-friendly email-account attached to your domain and accessible through you hosting account can be very useful. That is, if you choose email hosting. No more hassle with slow webmail platforms or complicated account preferences. A web host dedicated in providing the best email services will not allow any customer aggravation. Offering great webmail solutions, unlimited email accounts and supporting POP3 and IMAP, what you could ever want and need email-wise the email host will provide.

An email hosting service offers premium email, as opposed to those webmail offerings supported by ads. Small businesses can make excellent use of the services provided by an email hosting provider:

• Custom email configurations
• Large number of email accounts
• Email authentication for variations and subsets within the domain name
• Identification and channeling of incoming email based on custom email name conventions

The most important duty a provider of an email hosting service does provide is the management and operation of the email servers that provide the email services to you. You no longer have to worry about server hardware, OS service packs or software upgrades. What you get is standard POP3, IMAP or SMTP email based on open source email server applications that work with standard email clients, including Outlook and any other POP3, IMAP or SMTP email client. Anti-virus protection and spam filtering are standard features on the server side.

If you are subscribing for a email hosting then these are features you should look for:
Scalability, performance and reliability are all integral components of these email systems at a cost much less than running the same system in-house. Standard features to look for in a provider’s offering of an email hosting solution are:

• Email forwarding
• Custom vacation messaging
• Unlimited number of attachments
• Unlimited attachment size
• Global access via Internet
• Shared calendaring
• Shared contact list
• Administration of group and user lists
• Accessible company directory
• Purge or recall within spam folder

24×7 support should be a given for any provider, though they may choose to implement such support not only by phone, but also via email and online. Support should also be available for migration from other email platforms.

Various companies which provide email hosting are iPage, InMotion, FatCow etc.