POP3 Email and Webmail

You Might be Better Suited to Swimming With Sharks!
By Jay McCormack

Running a web hosting company is not as easy as it seems, in fact if I had to choose again maybe I would choose swimming with sharks rather than being a web host.

The learning curve for me was huge, so I thought I would share with you what I learned. Firstly you'll need to find a good webhosting company. I'm not going to pretend to recommend anyone in this article; you just need to search hard to find someone that has the right technology, the right bandwidth and the right support.

I ended up choosing a dedicated windows 2003 server with 250 Gb of bandwidth and 80 Gb of hard disk space. I can remote desktop to this server at any time to make any modifications I need which provides great flexability. But with this flexability comes complexity.

Your customers will expect the following from you:
- POP3 email and webmail
- Web site hosting
- FTP access
- Efficient billing
- Excellent support
- Statistics

Providing all of this is not easy and for the important things like statistics or email it's worth paying to get the right tools. If these things break then your customers yell and scream until their fixed.

For email I selected SmarterMail from SmarterTools. This is a great tool that provides POP3 and IMAP support and webmail. It integrates with virus software and SPAM software (with a little work) however it's reliable and easy to use.