“As customers have more reliable and higher bandwidth internet connections, are there advantages to hosting email back on-premise?“
While email has been around since the early 1970s, it wasn’t until the 1990s that sending and receiving emails became commonplace. For our small business customers back then, internet connections were dial-up, typically handled via modems in individual computers. Emails were collected from the internet provider’s system, but this soon became cumbersome as connections couldn’t be shared easily and organisations often were only able to have a single email address from their provider.
In the late 1990s, we saw a shift in how internet connections were provided to staff and how emails were accessed. Customers got their own domain names and modems moved out of the desktop and into the server. “Mail Server” software would trigger the modem to dial up so it could download email from the internet provider (typically every half hour on weekdays) and seamlessly distribute that email to staff. Likewise, outbound email would be sent every half hour, or when several emails were waiting to go out, the modem would initiate a connection and send them immediately.
Once ADSL connections with an “always on” connection became available, dial-up connections and modems in servers became unnecessary, but the “on-premise” mail server remained a cornerstone of most business networks for many years. Users could send and receive email across the world without the need for dial-up, making email a quick and essential way to conduct business.
In the early 2000s, we started to see pain points with the “on-premise” server situation, particularly in businesses with sales staff. Such staff could easily access email when in the office, but as soon as they left the building, it became hard for these “road warriors” to stay in touch, even those who had mobile phones or laptops provided.
The combination of low internet connection speeds and staff away from the office needing access to email prompted a move to email servers hosted directly on the internet. By the late 2000s, most small businesses had moved their email servers out of their offices and into hosted email environments on shared servers. In 2008, we had already started moving customers’ mail from on-premise to what became known as “cloud hosted”, and by 2014, all customers had moved to a Hosted Exchange email system.
Since then, we’ve seen major developments by organisations like Microsoft. In 2017, they released what was then called Office 365. For the first time, not only did Microsoft want to sell you software to run on your desktops and servers, but they also wanted to store your data on their servers. In those early years, Hosted Exchange remained far superior to Office 365, which simply did not carry the same features as Hosted Exchange.
Hosting our customers data outside of our customers network has never really felt 100% comfortable. Microsoft – already the most popular choice for small businesses – were monopolistic in their approach to software sales. Giving them your data was, in my mind, another nail in the coffin for fair trade and open standards. In a similar way Google (which has never really reached any meaningful market share on the desktop operating system) are very skilled at tracking you around the internet, so hosting your data (and your customers data) in the Google ecosystem speaks to the same problem of data sovereignty.
There’s no doubt that Microsoft has produced a robust and reliable email and collaboration system in what is now called Microsoft 365. The uptime of their systems is excellent, and though the support we receive from staff can sometimes be lacking, the infrastructure that hosts email on these platforms is very well maintained and cared for. There are exceptions, of course – Microsoft 365 does fail from time to time as any email server will do, but generally the reliability is excellent.
In the last 30 years then, the functions of a mail server has largely remained the same but have moved into the cloud to accommodate the needs of flexible working. Remember, though – this was solely a consequence of internet connections that were not fit for hosting email servers “on-premise”.
As customers have more reliable and higher bandwidth internet connections, are there advantages to hosting email back on-premise?
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but from where I’m sitting, there are distinct advantages in terms of cost, privacy, and fair trade. There’s no doubt we will continue to see and support a variety of solutions, including Microsoft 365 services, but there is also space for on-premise solutions to make a comeback. The software is and technology is there and is more mature than its cloud hosted variants, so its a possibility.
For those customers who recently experienced outages with their Hosted Exchange environment, it might be worth considering these alternatives. While Microsoft 365 is an easy choice, it’s not necessarily the right one for every business. On-premise solutions offer potential benefits in terms of cost savings, data control, and reduced dependence on large tech companies. As internet infrastructure continues to improve, the viability of on-premise email servers increases, potentially marking a return to a more diverse email hosting landscape.
We shall be taking a fresh look at on prem email servers as we think they’ll save money and help you to regain control of your data. Watch this space!