The way we communicate with each other has changed dramatically in the last 20 years. The postman’s bag has become lighter as the number of hand written letters declines in favour of electronic mail. We all check our email ‘inboxes’ several times a day, and for international business, email is the correspondence of choice. However is your Internet service provider giving you the best possible service, or is your business suffering slow connections, limited server space and a vulnerability to viral attack?

Email – the heart of business

Send a message by email and it could be on the other side of the world in seconds, rather than days if you sent it by regular mail. Originally created by Tim Berners Lee at the Cern Hadron Collider, email was specifically designed to allow scientists and business people to talk to each other instantly. That simple piece of HTML programming revolutionised international communications and catapulted business into the 21st Century. Now even contracts and large documents can be sent as an attachment by email, cutting out time consuming and costly postal services. Email really is the beating heart of international business.

But if your ISP isn’t business-orientated, you could be losing out. A standard ISP host has a limited capacity for storage and businesses using non-business ISPs can find that their capacity is quickly filled. This can instantly stop communication, bringing your business to a halt until you’ve had the time to do some ‘housekeeping’ and clear old emails from the system. For large organisations this can be a real problem and deals have been lost simply because an ISP server was full and that crucial email didn’t get through in time.

Presenting the right image

There is also the important aspect of presenting the right business image. A standard ISP email host allows you to customise your emails to an extent, but not in a business format. Business email hosting gives you the freedom to do much more with your email, making the presentation more professional and businesslike. Signatures and links can be added instantly every time you create a business email, and the greater ISP capacity means that you have the ability to send much larger data packages without slowing the download speed to a crawl.

Keeping your business safe

Business ISP hosts also understand the importance of security. As a result, business email hosts put far more emphasis on viral control measures and firewalls, keeping your business safe from possible attacks. Powerful spam filters prevent those non-malicious but still annoying advertising emails from ever reaching their destination, pinging them back to the sender. This keeps your inbox free of unwanted clutter and cuts down the time you have to spend scanning each email to see if it’s genuine or if it is merely spam.

Email is the single most popular use of the Internet, with millions being sent across the world every day. If you’re in business, can you afford to leave your important messages to chance? By choosing a business ISP provider, you can be certain that your message will reach its destination safely, will look professional and will never be held up because your server is ‘full’. Smart businesses trust their email to a professional email host service. Do you?

Author Bio: Contacts For interviews, images or comments contact: Chris Bourne Online Manager Intercity http://www.intercity-uk.com About the Author Chris Bourne – Intercity is a leading independent service provider in the business communications market offering business email solutions suited to benefit small and medium businesses.

Category: Business Management
Keywords: international business,business email, hosting, Business ISP ,business email hosting,email host