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Simply Mail Solutions, based in Warrington, Cheshire, UK was set up in 2006 to enter the growing market for email hosting, particularly aimed at SMEs. The company has grown rapidly and has over 1000 customers in 35 countries.
SMS is setting standards for the email hosting industry in four ways:
• Equipment is located in two independent high quality Data Centres in Manchester with excellent separate Internet connectivity and all the facilities such as back-up power that continuously on-line services now require. The locations are connected by high speed diversely routed fibre links so that both sites have completely independent Internet connections each of which has diverse connectivity. The fibre connection effectively puts the sites on the same LAN allowing SMS to build in redundancy and data transfers from servers and appliances between sites. Development and some backup customer functions are located at the SMS NOC – effectively a third site.
• Use of high availability data storage from leading supplier NetApps ensures that data is always available and backed up continuously using near-instant SnapShot technology.
• Servers are now VMware clusters. This means that the various software servers are running on a smaller number of closely interconnected very powerful hardware servers. Should a software server crash its functions can be running on other servers in the cluster in seconds (even if the hardware is actually in the other data centre). Also because the servers can be used more efficiently less power is required hence they are a green solution compared with lots of underutilised smaller servers.
• The in-house developed Control Panel allows users to easily manage their mailboxes on-line whenever they want. The CRM system is also available on-line 24/7 allowing users to manage their billing, at any time, from anywhere.
SMS offers the following email servers: SMS NexGen a powerful POP3/IMAP option, MS Exchange, and Zimbra CS plus Windows Mobile 5/6 and BlackBerry support with full push email/calendars/contacts/tasks. These are complimented by anti-spam, anti-virus, domain registration and web hosting options. Larger users go for dedicated rather than shared hosting.
The market for email hosting has had two major drivers a) the increasing cost and hassle in installing, running, and maintaining a server and b) the increasing use of mobile phones for email. The latter requires more advanced email server software such as Microsoft Exchange, Zimbra CS and BlackBerry BES and places even more load on the servers and the people who have to maintain them. SMS has just added support for BlackBerry mobile phones and also supports Windows Mobile which is available on many smartphones. Apple iPhone is also supported.
SMS MD Colin Smith commented “It is important to stand back and look at what is required to build a world class email hosting company and we believe that with the developments we have made, we are setting that standard. Two hosting sites was a major development allowing us to move towards a very robust system, even towards disaster recovery standards. We believe that this will be a major consideration for customers as we expand because of the importance of email in the corporate IT structure. It also increases the incentive for larger companies (hundreds or thousands or mailboxes) to outsource their email to us.”
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colin[.]simplymailsolutions.com 
