I got a good chuckle the other day while reading an article from Dreamhost, a popular web hosting company. The blog post, What Web Hosting is For, is all about email. They make the case that, while their customers buy web hosting, it’s email that their customers use more than anything—and they hate managing email for their customers. To quote them:

“Web Hosting is for email.

Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn’t add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into “simple� old email.�

I have to give Dreamhost some credit here because they’re saying what many web hosting companies are really thinking. I’ve long said that web hosting companies offer email as a checklist item—something they spend very little time on. And while email hosting drives probably less than 1% of revenue for most of them, it likely drives up to 50% of support. What a bummer!

This is actually why we merged with Rackspace. They view the world differently which happened to be the same as us. They realize that IT hosting is a big part of the future and that IT starts with email. And so they’ve empowered us to maintain our focus on business-class email.

Dreamhost goes on to say that, when looking for a web host, people have:

“. . . been conditioned by Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and Gmail to give email no value. I mean, everybody gives it away for free… nobody gives (real) web hosting away for free.

And yet, in the end, the only thing (sadly?) that actually ends up getting used, is that “no-value� email!�

They are right here, too. The only argument I’d make is that while there is real web hosting (like what they offer, I’m sure), there is real email hosting as well. Free email doesn’t cut it in the business world. In fact, one of our largest sources of new customer acquisition is from businesses that currently host email with a web hosting company that doesn’t take email seriously. While it’s typically cheap or free, sooner or later they realize they need to work with a company that does this for a living. We currently host more than 800,000 paid email accounts—so we’re obviously not the only ones that think like this. Businesses do too. Besides, why would you want to leave your most important business communication tool up to someone that doesn’t even want to host it for you?

Microsoft continues to embrace the software-as-a-service path and has big hopes for hosted Exchange in the future. According the Radicati Group, Exchange will run about 210 million corporate email accounts in 2008, growing to 319 million mailboxes in 2012—and Microsoft says 50% of them will be hosted. Not bad. It will be interesting to see if such a big company can make this kind of strategic shift—and how much they’ll involve partners along the way.

Mailtrust has two exciting new announcements to share:

Hosted Exchange 2007

We are now offering Hosted Exchange 2007. With Hosted Exchange, you get all the benefits of a Microsoft Exchange® environment, without the headaches of hosting it yourself. And, what’s better, you can combine Hosted Exchange with our Noteworthy service, on a per-user basis. This cost effective and flexible solution ensures that you get exactly what you need when it comes to your email: Hosted Exchange for users who need the powerful collaboration tools that come from Microsoft Exchange, and Noteworthy hosted email (our lower-cost, yet fully featured email hosting solution) for everyone else. We expect that this Hosted Exchange + Noteworthy offering will benefit you by minimizing cost and maximizing productivity. The choice is now yours.

Enhanced Control Panel

We have also launched the latest release of our administrative control panel. We’ve completely redesigned the user interface and improved navigation. Our customers will still have full access to all of the tools they’ve always had, in addition to some exciting new tools built around the introduction of Hosted Exchange 2007. Now administrators can manage all of their mailboxes (Hosted Exchange 2007 and Noteworthy) through a single application. To learn more about Control Panel 3.0, you can view our special recorded webinar.

Over the next few months we will slowly be upgrading current customers over to the new control panel. You can also choose to send a request through the ticketing section of your control panel to request an upgrade earlier.
To purchase or view pricing for Hosted Exchange 2007, log in to the control panel and click Upgrades. Each mailbox includes a license to Outlook 2007 or Entourage 2008, which can be downloaded online.

And, as always, the customer care team is always available, and you can contact us directly any time at support@mailtrust.com.