There are quite a few free email services out there: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and lots of others offer these free, but if there's a problem or e-mails with essential information are lost, you're likely to be out of luck.

Don't get me wrong, free email accounts are fine for personal and non-mission critical uses, but think twice about using them for your business.

Amid a tough economy, free or low-cost Web-based e-mail services such as Google's Gmail or Google Apps, Microsoft's Hotmail, and Yahoo! mail are hugely popular, not just with consumers but also with small businesses. Microsoft,operates a free service called Office Live Small Business that boasts 2.5 million customers. But while convenient and low-cost, these services also carry a lot of risks that heavy e-mail users, especially small businesses, should consider carefully before signing up.

If e-mail is crucial for your business, no matter how small, then it's too important to entrust to a free Web-mail service. Many small businesses now use email as virtual filing cabinets containing important documents, contact information, sales leads, and other crucial business information.

Service can fail for hours on end, messages can be delayed or lost entirely, and often there's little or no recourse for the customer who has suffered losses in both data and productivity. On Oct. 13, Google's  Postini spam-controlling service held up the delivery of mail to customers of the Google Apps e-mail service for several hours. In February of last year, Microsoft's Hotmail failed for users both in the U.S. and Europe for as long as six hours. And in 2007 some 4.5 million e-mail messages stored for 275,000 users of Yahoo!

Given the number of Web-based e-mail services that have sprung up in recent years, it pays to shop around. "These services offer a great advantage in that there's someone running the servers day and night who knows how to take care of them and who's doing the automatic backups and upgrades," says Radicati. And like anything else, good service comes at a price. Charges of $10 to $20 per user per month are typical but can go higher depending on features.

SmallBizWebServices offers full Hosting and Email services as a GoDaddy Reseller. We often are able to offer below retail prices due to our relationship with GoDaddy. In the 5 plus years of using SmallBizWebServices email products, we have experienced 99.999% uptime - I just can not remember the last time we experienced an email issue - it just works!

Visit SmallBizWebServices.com for more information or call us: 828-553-7069.