Do You Have a Backup Email Server?

So your office is large enough to warrant an Exchange server. You are done with the days of popping your email off an ISP. You have your own domain, your own Exchange server a fat T1 and you are in the world of collaboration. You have shared folders, contacts, calendars, Blackberry’s and Iphone’s. Everyone is working and life is good…… Things are good until a mid-week storm comes through town at 9:00 AM. The storm knocks out your power and your internet. The power comes up in 30 minutes and your internet returns after 2 hours. What happened to all of the email that was coming to your exchange server during that time? It all bounced back to the sender. Unless they call or keep trying to send that correspondence is gone. The sale, support or joke has dropped into the SMTP underworld. Now you start asking yourself “Why don’t I have a backup email server?”

What do you mean you are a small business and cannot afford to have two email servers? All it takes is another $2500 plus labor and you will have a spare email server sitting in your office next to your existing email server. However when the power or internet goes out then both servers will be offline. Well then let’s host it at a local data center. That won’t cost more than $500 more per month and now you are redundant. Or maybe not…

These are the kind of things that small business owners deal with all of the time. There are solutions that cost too much money then there are practical solutions. Fortunately the problem of a backup email server is an inexpensive problem to fix. If you do a search for backup email servers there are a number of providers. I have used dyndns.org, tzo.com and dnsmadeeasy.com. They are all affordable and fairly easy to use.

Here is how it works: You sign up with one of these backup email providers it will cost somewhere between $50 and $80 per year. You setup your MX records with a primary and a secondary record. Make the primary your server and the secondary their server. In the event that your server is down their server will receive the email. When your server comes back online their server will send the email to yours. Voila! I have also used this solution for clients who are moving offices. While the server is down they are not losing emails.

This is one solution of many. It is not very magical or sexy but these are the kinds of things that small business owners do to keep moving forward. It is not about throwing money at the problem it is about coming up with a solution.

If you need solutions or assistance with your email in any capacity we would love to help. Here at Sublime Computer Services we make your technology work!

Adam Bell
Owner of Sublime Computer Services
adam@sublimecomp.com
615-942-0850
www.sublimecomp.com