Remote Hosting

This is more in the software-as-a-service category. You get an admin dashboard and are responsible for managing users and mail flow. The hosting service provide will help you with basic things, but you’re doing most of the work yourself.

Having manged 100K+ user mail systems and migrated from on-prem sendmail to exchange and then O365 and Google, I can confidently say the infrastructure and even platform amounts to less than 10% of the cost of providing the service.

The main advantage to hosting is that you’re not managing the platform, installing patches and replacing hardware. The main disadvantage is is that you have little control and sometimes things are broken and you can’t do anything about it.

Medium sized organizations benefit most from hosting. You probably need a productivity suite anyways, and email is usually wrapped up in that. It saves you from having to specialize someone in email and the infrastructure associated with it.

But if controlling access to your data is paramount, then be aware that you have lost that and treat email as a public conversation.