How Big Does Your Email Server Need To Be?

Whether it’s for internal communications or exchanging information with customers and clients, emails have become of the most essential tools in the business world. Research cited in an article published on the Inter Press Service News Agency claims that email is the “most prominent form of communication” for 73% of businesses. But to send business emails, you first need an email hosting service like Office 365 and Zoho Workplace to establish your domain name. Then, you need to purchase or rent servers to host your emails.

But email servers aren’t cheap. In fact, renting one small server can cost you around $100 to $200 per month. The challenge now is to determine how big your servers have to be without going over budget.

To this end, here are three questions you need to ask yourself:

Are you installing security features?

Business emails are often the target of a lot of cybercrime, as sensitive data is exchanged on the platform. You can install a number of security features into your network like two-factor authentication to prevent dubious emails from entering your network. An email management software like Mailtrim can also be used to filter out spam emails and protect your passwords.

However, servers with these features need to use more CPU power. The server’s CPU power is determined by the power limits of its PCB design. After all, depending on the layout, the PCB could have a different set of voltage rail connections, pins, and even resistance. The PCB’s capacity is determined by the server’s I/O performance. Fortunately, more servers mean better capacity. So, if you’re installing security features — which is highly recommended — you need to be prepared to pay for bigger servers.

How many people are in your company?

More people mean more unique emails. As such, the bigger your company is, the bigger your server’s capacity should be. If you have separate emails for customer support, contact information, and more purposes, you should be ready to increase your servers’ capacity as well. This case is also true if your employees are using email management software to organize files, as servers need extra space to run the software. The number of emails your business can send simultaneously is also dependent on your CPU and I/O capacity as well.

How big and how many emails do you send per day?

Of course, your server capacity isn’t just determined by the number of people who are using the email system, but rather, the number and size of messages it sends and receives as well. For example, one GHz-class server can process around 20,000 messages every hour. Email marketing is also seeing higher click-through rates recently, and because they usually contain images, you might also need bigger servers, if this is the strategy you're adopting.

Moreover, the email file sizes will affect how big your servers’ disk capacities are. Message-only emails are usually less than 1KB, so they aren’t a problem. But businesses that send a lot of PDF files, videos, and other heavy attachments should be ready to pay for more servers.

The size of your email servers is determined by multiple variables, from the number of people using them to the types of email they send and receive. Review the way your company uses emails and you’ll arrive at the right answer. And it’s important to remember that you’re free to scale up any time you feel like you’re going overcapacity.