Email is at the very core of how businesses communicate today. Due to the availability and adoption of the internet in the corporate workplace, email has quickly risen to surpass written, telephone, and fax communication. It has become the primary mode of day-to-day and legally-binding business communication. This is why businesses need to ensure their email solution is efficient, optimal, reliable, and cost-effective. A frequently asked question around email management is, “Which solution is more reliable, cost effective and efficient between on-premise/self-hosted and third-party cloud-hosted email?” Businesses are often faced with a dilemma. This is whether to move their emails to the cloud or to host and manage them within their business premises. In this article, we share our first-hand experience with email management through our research. We have also interacted with hundreds of business owners, IT managers, consultants and employees. We found that many experience the following challenges while running on-premise email servers.

1. 15 Challenges of On-Premise or Self-Hosted Email For
Business
Email is at the very core of how businesses communicate today. Due to the availability
and adoption of the internet in the corporate workplace, email has quickly risen to
surpass written, telephone, and fax communication. It has become the primary mode
of day-to-day and legally-binding business communication. This is why businesses
need to ensure their email solution is efficient, optimal, reliable, and cost-effective.
A frequently asked question around email management is, “Which solution is more
reliable, cost effective and efficient between on-premise/self-hosted and third-party
cloud-hosted email?”
Businesses are often faced with a dilemma. This is whether to move their emails to the
cloud or to host and manage them within their business premises.
In this article, we share our first-hand experience with email management through our
research. We have also interacted with hundreds of business owners, IT managers,
consultants and employees. We found that many experience the following challenges
while running on-premise email servers.
1. Types of Email Hosting Options
We have different email hosting options. These are:
● Shared hosting – This is where an organization hosts its email on the same
server as their website. This server is shared with other organizations who use it
for similar purposes. This is not an ideal cloud-hosted email solution for various
reasons. We will not discuss these in this article. For more information on shared
hosting, click here.
● On-premise/self-hosted –This is where an organization installs and manages
their own mail server within their location. We will discuss this later in this
article.
● Third-party emailservice provider/cloud-hosted– Thisis where a third-
party service provider who specializes in hosted email solutions hosts email on

2. behalf of an organization. These providers have many years of experience and
expertise in managing email and collaboration tools.
2. Challenges of On-Premise Email/ Self-hosted Email
While it is possible to run your own internal email server, it is often not the best option
for a variety of reasons. Research consistently shows that businesses running on-
premise email servers consistently encounter one or more of the following challenges
or limitations:
i. High directand indirectcosts
There are high direct and indirect costs of managing and maintaining an on-premise
email server including but not limited to: –
● High capex; high capital expenditures are incurred when new servers need to be
purchased. This can be as a result of hardware end-of-life, limited storage,
limited processing capacity, or just the need for upgrade to ensure optimal
performance
● High, unpredictable recurrent support costs: Because every on-premise
installation is customized and may include solutions from multiple vendors, it
may become difficult and/or expensive to support each solution. Some may
require specialized skills that may not be present in-house.
● Often, these are costs which cannot be predicted as they have to be analyzed as
need arises. For example, if the on-premise mail server crashes, any number of
different components within your organization including other servers that host
Active Directory (user accounts/security), DNS Internet Connections and
firewalls may require maintenance. This often means that the business and staff
are unable to access their email during this time.
● Constantly depreciating or dead assets: on average, many organizations with
on-premise servers often remain with fixed, static technology for a period of five
years. During a refresh or upgrade, these become dead assets in the
organization.

3. ● Monitoring costs: To minimize interruption, some organizations deploy
automated tools to monitor service and infrastructure uptime and also
provision a team to work in shifts to monitor and maintain these setups;
● Cost of backup offsite equipment: Ensuring business continuity by replicating
email to a secondary offsite server is an expensive proposition that is often
beyond the reach of many organizations.
● Because of the criticality of email in businesses, to minimize downtime, some
organizations are forced to acquire and maintain a backup internet link for
redundant email connectivity.
● New businesses’ initial cost of onboarding is high because it often demands a
large initial investment in hardware, software, and associated licenses.
ii. Mail servers are complex to setup
For new businesses, the process of procurement, deployment, testing, and optimizing
can mean that the business takes a long time to get started.
A typical email server consists of different software components. These include Mail
Transfer Agent, Mail Delivery Agent, IMAP, and/or POP3 Servers. They work together to
allow it to achieve its full functionality. Each component must be configured and tuned
to work seamlessly to provide a fully-functioning mail server.
In addition to these components, you will probably also want to add spam filtering,
antivirus and web mail components. Because they have so many moving parts, email
servers can become complex and difficult to set up.
Some software packages include the functionality of multiple components. The choice
of each component is often left up to the business decision-makers. In addition to the
software components, mail servers need a domain name, the appropriate DNS records
and an SSL certificate.
iii. Difficult systemupgrades
Businesses are often faced with significant risk of data loss or major downtimes during
system upgrades. With on-premise email solutions, upgrading systems is a complex

4. process. Sometimes, it requires specialized IT teams to come in to perform or support
the upgrade process.
v. Maintenance istime-consuming
There are the obvious maintenance tasks. For example, continuously keeping your
antivirus and spam filtering rules, and all of the mail server components up to date.
There is also the responsibility of backing up your email data. These issues become the
responsibility of the business to resolve.
vi. Staying offblacklists
Keeping your email server off of the various blacklists, also known as DNSBL, blocklists,
or blackhole lists remains a crucial task in managing your email server. These lists
contain IP addresses of mail servers that were reported to send spam or junk mail (or
for having improperly configured DNS records).
Many email severs subscribe to one or more of these blacklists and filter incoming
messages based on whether the mail server that sent the messages is on the list(s). If
your mail server is blacklisted, your outgoing messages may be filtered and discarded
before they reach their intended recipients.
In the unfortunate event that your mail server is blacklisted, it is often possible to get it
unlisted (or removed from the blacklist). This means you need to determine the reason
for being blacklisted and then resolve the issue. After this, you will want to look up the
blacklist removal process for the particular list that your mail server is on and follow it.
vii. Troubleshooting isdifficult
The mere concept of resolving issues or tickets raised by users within your organization
on why they are unable to send or receive email, or why their sent messages are not
being received can sometimes be time consuming to troubleshoot. The larger the
organization, the more time consuming this exercise becomes.
The issue may be caused by a misconfiguration in one of the many mail server
components such as a poorly-tuned outgoing spam filter or by an external problem

5. such as being on a blacklist. The process of narrowing down on the exact issue may
sometimes take a lot of time to determine with certainty and fix.
viii. Difficult to scale
With on-premise servers, scaling often necessitates a re-architecture leading to
downtimes, risk of data loss, and drop in productivity. In addition, scaling is often not
easy due to long procurement cycles in some organizations.
ix. Frequentemaildowntime
Businesses have reported frequent downtime as a result of poor internet connectivity,
power outages, or server hardware failure. In cases where this continues for a
prolonged period of time, this may paralyze critical business operations.
x. Lowersecurity
On-premise or self-hosted servers are reported to have frequent email bounce errors,
spam, viruses, malware, emails going to spam/junk folder, email spoofing as well as a
greater risk of user mailboxes being compromised. This increases the risk that an
organization may be blacklisted on the internet.
xi. Increased riskofdata loss
There is also increased risk of complete or partial data loss in the event of calamities
such as fire, theft, floods, etc., where there is no offsite, regularly-tested backup of
servers. While some businesses have backups, many of them attest to the fact that they
are not sure whether these backups would work in the event of a disaster as many are
not tested on a regular basis. Many companies do not have the right tools to help in
monitoring and reporting failed backups for action.
xii. Synchronizationlimitations
Email in some cases may not synchronize across multiple devices (desktop PC, laptop,
tablet or mobile devices).

6. xiv. Emaildelays
Organizations with self-hosted solutions report occasional delays when sending and
receiving email.
xv. Lackofcollaboration tools
On-premise servers usually lack collaboration tools such as file sharing,
synchronization, and video/chat tools.
3. Conclusion
There are several downsides of on-premise or self-hosted email solutions which can
spell disaster for many businesses.
For most decision-makers, it always seems cheaper and more secure to self-host the
email systems. It is clearly not accurate to deem on-premise servers as cheaper.
Decision-makers often concentrate on the direct costs. They fail to recognize the
indirect costs that make on-premise or self-hosting solutions notoriously costly and
complex to procure, maintain and scale. Additionally, setting up and maintaining your
own email server for most businesses is complicated and time consuming. The costs
associated with managing and maintaining all the components in a mail server can run
exponentially high in the long run.
4. The Alternative?
The myriad issues associated with on-premise or self-hosted servers has resulted in
rapid growth in the number of businesses moving to the cloud. There is a lot to be
gained from choosing a hosted email provider rather than managing your own in-
house or self-hosted server.