8 Best Office 365 Hosting Providers (Feb. 2024)

Office 365 is a popular choice for individuals, businesses, and organizations looking to streamline operations and improve productivity, collaboration, and overall efficiency. That’s why some hosts integrate Office 365 into their hosting platforms so users make use of its tremendous benefits. Our team has tested hundreds of email hosting providers and interviewed a diverse cross section of users to determine the best Office 365 hosting providers.

Here’s what we discovered.

Shared hosting is an excellent option for an individual or a small business that wants to save money and maximize the benefits of Office 365. We’ve reviewed some of the best shared hosting providers with Office 365 support, focusing on key features such as security, availability and uptime, support, and storage, and narrowed it down to the following eight hosts.

The hosting providers listed above also offer easy setup processes, ideal for users with limited technical knowledge. For example, with Bluehost, you can set up Office 365 in three easy steps.

Choosing a web host that offers email-specific hosting solutions rather than general hosting is essential. This is because specialized email hosting providers offer more features and functionality and are better equipped to provide a high-quality email service that includes encryption, spam filtering, and virus protection.

In addition, they tend to have more experience managing email servers, including handling email-related issues and ensuring security and reliability.

6. Exchange Online

Microsoft’s premium email hosting service has all the collaboration tools and features you need to work smarter anywhere.

They offer three plans: Exchange Online (Plan 1), Exchange Online (Plan 2), and Microsoft 365 Business Standard.

Regardless of the plan you choose, you can rest assured of 99.9% reliability, advanced security features, data loss prevention, IT-level phone support 24/7, and remote access.

7. RackSpace Email

Rackspace lets you take productivity to the next level with its Microsoft Office 365 hosting solutions. The company offers three main plans.

The Office 365 Exchange Essentials is a budget-friendly option and allows online and mobile access to Office 365 emails. On the other hand, the Office 365 Exchange Online Plan 1, the second option, offers up to 50-gigabyte mailboxes, email archiving, and unlimited users. Finally, the Office 365 Exchange Online Plan 2 has all features of Exchange Online Plan 1 and includes 100 gigabytes of storage, data loss prevention, and advanced security.

Whatever plan you choose, you’ll enjoy 24/7/365 support, email migration assistance (up to 250 users), and access to top-tier Office 365 experts. Rackspace also allows you to add other Office apps, such as Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote, at a small fee.

8. Zoho Mail

Zoho Mail integrates Office 365 emails with other productivity applications to help businesses and organizations work from a centralized location.

By integrating Zoho and Office 365, you wont need to switch between different applications or worry about managing multiple accounts.

Besides providing simplified access to Office 365, this hosting provider also offers useful tools for various departments such as finance, customer support, human resources, and sales and marketing.

Email hosting is a service that provides email servers and storage space to host email accounts for individuals, businesses, and organizations. With email hosting, users can send and receive emails using their own custom domain name, create multiple email accounts, and use features such as spam filtering, virus protection, and email encryption to ensure the security of email communication.

The key difference is that web hosting hosts websites, while email hosting hosts emails. To put things into perspective, web hosting provides server space and connectivity to host websites, web applications, and related files on the internet. In other words, it allows individuals and businesses to make their websites accessible online.

On the other hand, email hosting focuses solely on providing email services and comes equipped with advanced security features. Here, the server stores your email content and helps send or receive new emails.

While having a custom email domain, also known as a business email, is not required to communicate with your clients or partners, it has many benefits. Here are some notable perks of having a professional email account.

• Makes your business or organization look more professional and established, creating trust and credibility with customers, clients, and partners.
• Allows you to use your brand name in your hosted email address, which helps to reinforce your brand identity by making it more memorable to your contacts.
• Gives you complete control over your email accounts, including adding, deleting, and managing accounts as needed. You can also set up a custom email mailbox for different departments or employees within your organization, e.g., sales@yourdomain.com, support@yourdomain.com, and jobs@yourdomain.com.
• Improves security by allowing you to use advanced email authentication protocols to protect against phishing and other email-based attacks.

Using a custom domain name for your email can help you present a more professional image, strengthen your brand, and improve security and flexibility.

Security, storage, reliability, and 24/7 support are key factors to consider when choosing an email hosting service provider. Regarding security, you need an email host that offers spam filtering, virus protection, and email encryption.

As for email storage, look for a minimum of 10 gigabytes per email. For context, every Google Account (the free email service only) comes with at least 15 gigabytes of cloud storage shared across various Google applications, such as Google Drive, which includes Google Sheets and Google Docs.

If you opt to upgrade to Google Workspace, one of the cheapest email hosting services, their Business Starter plan starts at 30 gigabytes per user. So at least 10 gigabytes of storage is sufficient for starters (email only), assuming you won’t need to send large files regularly.

Keep in mind that some email providers, such as A2 Hosting, offer unlimited storage at no extra cost. You may want to take advantage of such offers to save money.

Lastly, the best email hosting provider should guarantee 99.9% uptime and provide support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.