Email hosting

An internet hosting service that runs email servers is known as email hosting.

Premium email at a cost is usually offered by email hosting services, as opposed to advertising supported free email or free webmail. Email hosting services therefore differ from typical end-user email providers such as webmail sites.

Email hosting services cater more to demanding email users and Small and Mid Size (SME) businesses, whereas larger enterprises tend to run their own email hosting service.

Email hosting providers allow for premium email services along with custom configurations and large number of accounts. In addition to this, hosting providers manage user's own domain name, including any email authentication scheme that the domain owner wishes to enforce in order to convey the meaning that using a specific domain name identifies and qualifies email senders.

Advanced premium email solutions hosted on dedicated custom email platforms are offered by most email hosting providers. The technology and offering of different email hosting providers can therefore vary towards different needs.

Email offered by most webhosting companies is usually more basic standardised POP3 based email and webmail based on open source webmail applications like Horde or Squirrelmail. Mostly all webhosting providers offer standard basic email while not all email hosting providers offer webhosting.