I've been running
OmniKraft for two years now. In all that time, I've run all email service I needed through a company called
GMX. They have been a good and reliable service for some time, but the last few months, I've been wanting something more. I've been wanting to use email with the omnikraft.net domain.
Through some browsing on
Spiceworks, I happened to see an advertisement from
Zoho, I saw this about a month ago. It was an offer for email hosting for 25 mailboxes, 5GB of storage each using my own domain. Well shoot, just what I was looking for! I've been running my omnikraft.net email accounts from Zoho since, and love it!
It only took me a few minutes to create and setup the account. Zoho offered me a few ways to verify domain ownership, from creating DNS records to uploading a simple web page on the site. Once the ownership was proven, I had my account up and running! First thing I did was setup two-factor authentication with my favorite management app,
Authy. Since Zoho uses Google's 2FA system, it was easy peasy to setup security on my accounts.
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| The control panel for Zoho Mail. |
First mailbox I setup was for the website. Once I had that configured, I setup some aliases to make it easier to manage a few other services I rely on. I went to my website admin panel, plugged in all the account information and SMTP addresses, and I've now increased the professionalism that OmniKraft has. The control panel has a lot of options to better manage the system and the mailboxes, most of which I didn't need to change for my setup. While I'm just using their mail service, Zoho has plenty of other productivity apps that you can leverage, such as Customer Relationship Management for Sales and Marketing departments, Recruit for Human Resources, Books and Invoice for Finance and Creator for business processes.
The one question you may be asking yourself is "will this work for my business?" On the
pricing just for email, it makes sense for smaller companies who don't have many employees and don't need as many bells and whistles. If comparing to the largest competitor of hosted email, Microsoft, it can't compete; If you compare apples to apples between
Office 365 and Zoho. Where I see Zoho making sense for businesses is if you don't want to deal with the whole kit 'n kaboodle that other solutions can offer and are more focused on core functionality for an easier to swallow cost. One thing to keep in mind is that Zoho offers a free plan for up to ten mailboxes with 5GB of storage for each user. If that works for you, go for it! I don't know of any other services that allows you to use your own domain for email for free.
Ultimately, Zoho is aiming for smaller businesses for their services. Offering an À la carte solution for those who don't need all the bells and whistles and need a reliable service on the cheaper side, without getting a cheap service. Zoho focuses more on core functionality with an easily scalable product to help companies grow without having a dedicated IT staff or a Managed Services Provider (MSP) to help manage it for them.
Jimmy Tassin is the IT Manager of Midwest Regional Bank and has been involved with the Technology field for over thirteen years. His two hobbies are overseeing the daily operations of OmniKraft, a Minecraft server community, and writing at Goblinbyte.com.
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