MS Exchange Hosting: What You Should Know

As businesses continue to grow and rely more and more on email systems such as Microsoft Exchange, new technologies and services such a MS Exchange hosting are cropping up. What is MS Exchange hosting, you ask? MS is an acronym that stands for Microsoft and the term "Exchange hosting" applies to having one's Microsoft Exchange Server email platform hosted by a third party somewhere offsite. A company that purchases an MS Exchange hosting service from a third party rids itself of the day-to-day maintenance tasks of an in-house Microsoft Exchange implementation, freeing IT staff up to perform other user-facing tasks.

MS Exchange hosting providers vary widely in terms of costs in addition to what specific services are offered. Since there are so many variables that go into maintain a Microsoft Exchange email platform, it is critical to understand what is required before purchasing an MS Exchange hosting package. A company must have at least a moderate understanding of Microsoft Exchange before outsourcing such a critical application to a third party MS Exchange hosting provider. Otherwise, how would it know if it was getting a good deal or if the third party MS Exchange hosting services were any good?

Any MS Exchange hosting plan will provide basic online access to email and other information such as public folders and such. Such access is provided through email clients like Outlook and Outlook Express. What needs to e more carefully considered when choosing an MS Exchange hosting service provider is the supportability. What SLAs (service level agreements) are offered by these third parties? It is imperative that any MS Exchange hosting service include aggressive, yet realistic, performance and troubleshooting service level agreements. If a hosting company provides a two day service level agreement for a complete MS Exchange outage, hosting your MS Exchange system with them is probably a bad idea. On the flip side, MS Exchange hosting providers that promise to recover from a complete Exchange outage within 4 hours is probably something that you'd want to consider if you plan on outsourcing your Exchange platform to them.

As you can see, the most important aspect to consider when selecting an MS Exchange hosting provider is the overall availability of the hosted Exchange services and the time required to recover from an outage. There are, of course, costs associated with these items so it is also important to factor this in when determining who will host your MS Exchange platform.