Professional Email Hosting and Management

1. Size the company by requirements, not by plan name

Start with hosted domains, number of employees/mailboxes, expected mailbox usage, backup capacity, cron jobs, databases, SSL hosts, mailing lists, dedicated IPs and expected growth. A higher tier is useful only when its included bundle matches requirements that the company actually has.

• A 50-person company does not automatically need a VPS or a premium company plan.
• A one-site company with 50 ordinary mailboxes can fit Great Start if its other limits also fit.
• Compare a smaller plan plus required add-ons against the larger bundle before paying for unused features.

2. Check mailbox-count limits across the shared plans

The verified comparison shows 100 email addresses on Great Start, 500 on Great Office, unlimited on Great Company, 2,000 on Companies Saver and unlimited on Companies Medium. Mailbox count is only one sizing dimension; do not select a plan on this number alone.

• Great Start can be a valid business-email plan when 100 addresses are enough.
• Great Office adds more mailbox capacity together with other shared-plan resources.
• Great Company or the Companies plans become relevant when their wider bundle is actually needed.

3. Set an appropriate quota for each mailbox

GreatHosts CP lets you set an individual mailbox size from 100 MB up to 40 GB. The 40 GB value is a ceiling available to a mailbox, not an amount that must be reserved for every employee.

• Give ordinary users a sensible quota and increase it when usage justifies it.
• Larger management/archive mailboxes can have larger limits without giving the same quota to everyone.
• If an individual mailbox genuinely needs more than the verified 40 GB ceiling, treat that as a separate requirement before migration.

4. Size backup separately from mailbox count

The verified standard shared plans include 10 GB of backup capacity. Additional backup storage can be ordered in 20 GB increments as the account grows. Companies Saver includes 100 GB backup and Companies Medium includes 200 GB. This means a company can often grow its existing shared plan rather than moving to VPS merely because email data increased.

• Estimate how much company data should be covered by hosting backup.
• For standard plans, compare the needed 20 GB backup add-ons with the price and other benefits of a larger bundle.
• Do not choose Companies Saver or Companies Medium solely because their backup number is larger if the smaller-plan-plus-add-on combination is a better fit.
• Hosting backup/restore is not the same as immutable regulatory email archiving or guaranteed multi-year retention.

5. Create and manage mailboxes

The Email section of GreatHosts CP exposes Mailboxes for creating and managing hosted email accounts, including the per-mailbox size limit.

• Use strong, unique mailbox passwords.
• Use role addresses such as support@ or sales@ only when responsibility is clear.
• Review quotas as staff and mail history grow.

6. Use webmail and standard mail protocols

Roundcube webmail is available, and the verified environment supports normal SMTP, IMAP and POP access. IMAP is usually appropriate when the same mailbox is used across multiple devices.

• Use the account-provided SMTP/IMAP/POP settings rather than guessing ports or hosts.
• Use webmail to separate server-side issues from local mail-client issues.
• Keep device/client settings documented for company support.

7. Manage forwarding, filters, spam and SPF

GreatHosts CP exposes Email Forwarding, Filters, Spam controls and SPF Manager. These help organize mail flow and sender authentication, but should be configured deliberately so business mail is not accidentally lost.

• Avoid circular forwarding chains.
• Test important filters with sample messages.
• Keep SPF aligned with the services that actually send mail for the domain.

8. Use mailing lists and growth features when they fit

Mailing-list allowances differ by plan, and some resources are optional/add-on rather than universally included. The same GreatHosts growth principle applies: add or upgrade the specific capability before moving service class when that solves the requirement.

• Great Office includes a larger fixed mailing-list allowance in the verified comparison.
• Treat optional resources as current-plan/account items that must be confirmed before purchase.
• Re-size the account when several limits are being reached together; that is when a larger bundle can become better value.

9. Know when ordinary hosted email is not the same product

Normal company mail hosting and backup is different from a regulated archival system or a specialized high-volume outbound-mail platform. If the requirement is immutable multi-year retention, legal discovery, journaling, or large-scale transactional/marketing sending, evaluate that requirement separately rather than mislabeling ordinary hosting backup.

• Do not describe hosting backup as a compliance archive.
• High-volume transactional or marketing mail may need a specialist sending platform.
• For ordinary employee mail, do not default to an external provider when GreatHosts plan limits and backup sizing already fit.

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