[RndTbl] Shaw dropping bounces?

[John Lange]

I agree that the Shaw business package is over-priced compared to the
residential equivalent. That being said, for a business the cost is
relatively small in the grand scheme of things. The business package
also comes with static IPs and a somewhat better level of support than
residential.

As for local hosting, of the six things you list, "control, speed,
storage, availability, bandwidth, cost" I would agree with you on only
one, "control".

For organizations that have a philosophical or legal requirement to
maintain complete ownership over their systems, then they have no
choice to host their own mail.

But for most of the other things you list, the advantage is with the
cloud. For example, availability. I'll put Google's up time against
any single local hosted server any day.

And cost is significantly in the cloud's favor. Whether or not you
already own the server, you still have to pay to maintain, backup,
provide power, cooling, and pay someone. And in most cases license
software as well. For a smaller business those costs calculated on a
per/user basis are enormous.

And getting back to availability, what happens when it dies? By the
time you source new hardware, rebuild and recover you are looking at a
significant outage.

As for storage, most corporate mail servers do not have 7 Gigs of
storage per user and that is what you get for free just as a starting
point with Google hosted corporate mail.

The switch is completely transparent to the end user. They can
continue to use the same email client they always have but as a bonus
they can now use an excellent web-based client as well for checking
email remotely when they don't have their laptop with them.

Again, for large corporations it maybe(?) still makes sense to host
locally but for everyone else it's overwhelmingly in favour of the
cloud. I'm not saying there aren't situations where self-hosting makes
sense but those are increasingly rare.

By the way, I didn't understand your point on spam. Google's spam
filtering is near perfect. Much better than any of the commercial spam
filtering products I've seen which makes sense since Google can
aggregate spam reports from thousands of users to "learn" spam.

-- 
John Lange
www.johnlange.ca