Email Hosting explained

An e-mail hosting service is an Internet hosting service that runs e-mail hosting plans.

E-mail servers usually offer premium e-mail at a cost as opposed to advertising supported free e-mail or free webmail. E-mail hosting services thus differ from typical end-user e-mail providers such as webmail sites. They cater mostly to demanding e-mail users and Small and Mid Size (SMB) businesses that do not want to administer their own e-mail server. E-mail hosting providers allow for premium e-mail services along with custom configurations, large number of accounts and use of own domain name.

Most e-mail hosting providers offer advanced premium e-mail solutions hosted on dedicated servers as custom e-mail platforms. The technology and offering of different e-mail hosting providers can therefore vary towards different needs. E-mail offered by most webhosting companies is usually more basic standardized POP3 based e-mail and webmail based on open source webmail applications like Horde or Squirrelmail. Mostly all webhosting providers offer standard basic e-mail while not all e-mail hosting providers offer webhosting.