Downtime

This is a major issue, particularly in regard to the subtle perceptions of customers. It creates a bad public image when email is bounced back from a down server, or lost all together. Servers that are operated in-house are more than ten times more likely to experience prolonged downtime than those operated by dedicated email outsourcing companies. This mainly has to do with a lack of dedicated IT personnel in a small business who can devote their time to resolving the server problems. Email outsourcing firms often operate with double redundancy, meaning that even if one server crashes, another can step in to take its place without a pause in service.