New company mail hosting

[murraybiscuit]

What's my best mail option for a company starting out. They have a few subsidiaries, I don't think more than 6 different entities, and probably not more than 20 email accounts per company eventually. Some of those may just be forwarders to the holding company mailboxes.

They seem to have managed so far without an exchange solution, but I'd hate to do something short term which would hamstring them when they do grow bigger. Especially trying to migrate email accounts and mailboxes to another host/server.

The problem is that they're still small, but just big enough for Google Apps to charge, and their pricing looks pretty high, in my layman's opinion. The NS host has OpenXchange mail, is that worth checking out, or are there other affordably-tiered exchange solutions out there independent of web hosts?

What are the lessons you've learned, what can I learn from you?

 

[Zarathustra]

One word, Hetzner (http://www.hetzner.co.za/index.php/web-hosting/index/web-hosting/standard/).

We have been with them for many, many moons. Although they have the odd outage, it isn't anything serious. The provide good value for money, great service & once setup one can do most things oneself.

 

[DoringDraad]

Hi Murray.
There are some local web hosting companies that offer unlimited mailboxes (I can PM you a name or two if needed)
mostly linux based and accessible via imap/pop3 , or via webmail.

This is the cheapest option you can look at..
And if they download their email to local pc every day , then the web space wont be consumed by mailbox usage so you wont even need a large web hosting package either.

Depending on the amount of email flowing in and out , you will be either looking at a capped or uncapped hosting provider.

on cpanel you can also set email quotas to avoid going over the data limit.

I dont know if this answers your question , but the cheapest mail hosting option for me would be a cpanel account.

 

[PsyWulf]

What doring said ^ i'm very happy with Gridhost's shared servers options for non-exchange clients

 

[leonb]

GMail for business

 

[katangeleus]

Are they a South African company? If not Microsoft has their Exchange Services on cloud for about $7 a user, but they seem to only offer this in the US, Canada, UK and a few other places.

 

[w1z4rd]

The best option is Google Apps.

There are cheaper options, but if you want the best. Thats Google Apps for Business.

 

[murraybiscuit]

thanks guys. i'm busy trying to find out what they're currently using.
if they can get by without exchange features, i'd probably just stick with pop and imap using their current web host.
pity that ms exchange cloud isn't available locally.
i really love google apps, but the jump up to business accounts may be a bit overkill for what they need...

nobody tried openx-change at all?
http://www.namecheap.com/email/email-hosting-trial.aspx
i'm a bit loathe to try it on a new client, but wouldn't mind testing it personally...