Why Professional Hosting Is A Good Idea, And Why You Don’t Need To Reinvent The Wheel

Why can't I set up self-hosting on my computer without spending extra money on it?

If you have ever asked yourself such a question, having to choose between professional hosting and self-hosting, it's time to sort this out once and for all!

Self-hosting is a rather complicated procedure. It’s not too difficult to set up initially, but it is complicated to maintain it in such a way that it serves your business goals as intended. At this moment, you may be wondering: “What difficulties are you talking about?”

Good question!

Getting emails into the spam folder

Many companies use email newsletters to share important information with their customers and keep them up to date. This eliminates possible concerns about the services provided. These emails increase customer engagement and motivate them to interact with the brand. 

Imagine your goal is to follow a marketing plan, fulfill a sales plan, engage leads in a sales funnel, and ultimately sell your product. If email is your main tool for this purpose, but the emails do not reach the lead base or are completely ignored because they end up in the spam folder?

If you keep reading, you will see the answer is clearly “no.”

The mail server consists of many software components that may fail at some point or become outdated and work incorrectly. 

The more components there are in the mail server, the more difficult it is to configure them, diagnose problems, and monitor them to consistently maintain their relevance.

There are many reasons why corporate domains and IP addresses fall into the so-called blacklists and are blocked on mail servers. One of the main causes is outdated versions of some components. As mentioned above, the more components are involved in the operation of the system, the more difficult it is to keep them under constant, non-professional control in order to avoid emails falling into spam and spam traps.

But what if the corporate domain or IP address has already hit the blacklists?

Let's highlight the main scenarios for solving this problem from less costly to more expensive, in order to show how problematic and energy-intensive they are:

• Thanks to paid software monitoring blacklists for a period of time, you can identify mail servers where your domain is blacklisted. If the server does not automatically unblock after a certain period, you can write a letter asking to be removed from the blacklist.

However, it is important to note that such letters are considered in limited quantities, and in order to have an effect, require additional payment.

• Another point to consider is that you may be unable to handle things like downtime and service outages. 

We will also draw your attention to the fact that for constantly monitoring blacklists to pull domains and IP addresses from them, you will have a paid consultant for monitoring the current versions of components, update and configure them, in fact, you cannot do with the services of paid consultants.

• Often, after several written requests to mail servers to be removed from the blacklist, various sanctions may be imposed on your IP address, warnings may be issued, and it may be considered an illegal IP address used for spam mailings and spam traps.

In such cases, the best solution is often to replace the domain mail and IP address with a new one after each hit in the blacklists.

What if your local mail infrastructure does not have a function that allows you to change the domain and IP address? Should you customize and modify it from scratch?

To put it simply, companies use SMTP services to achieve better email delivery so they don’t have to worry about technical issues or their ability to send emails being jeopardized.

What if we said that all this can be configured once and the local tasks can be shifted onto the shoulders of a cloud provider without overpaying?

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) look at the reputation of your domain and IP address to decide whether your emails will be forwarded to recipients' inboxes or receive a one-way ticket to the spam folder.

A good SMTP service provider adds your company to the reputable trusted sender pool and protects your IP reputation with a variety of tools.

If you run your own SMTP server on a shared virtual machine, you cannot control the reputation of the sending IP address, which means you can share it with someone who is sending unwanted messages. 

This can cause your IP address to get blocked and you must win the favor of your ISP again.

Many ISPs and email providers place restrictions on the sending of emails to prevent spam senders and attackers. This can unnecessarily limit your business's ability to grow, attract, and maintain your customer base, especially if you send a lot of emails.

SMTP services allow you to scale, and as the volume of letters increases, it also allows you to request an increase in limits from a cloud provider.

SMTP service providers specialize in delivering, monitoring, and improving their email sending practices. You get access to a world-class email infrastructure as well as an experienced support team who can help you with complex email or deliverability issues.

That's right — we propose shifting all these tasks to the responsibility of SMTP services.

But what are the best SMTP services to use?

As seen below, our company conducted market research based on only a few major suppliers.

In summary, when you send an email, there are three main factors that affect your ability to do so successfully:

• Your SMTP email infrastructure

• Sender reputation

• Content of your posts

But these first two factors — email infrastructure and reputation of the domain and IP address — can be a big headache for senders. You can, of course, download and run your own SMTP mail server, But to do so you need to be tech-savvy and get used to regularly monitoring, diagnosing, and resolving deliverability issues so that you can build a great reputation with your mailbox providers.

Not everyone has the time or experience to do this.