Open Xchange Email Hosting
In this article posting we will introduce Open-Xchange — A new but might become one of the most popular Email solutions. if you're new, it's necessary to learn about it because many web hosting providers start to integrate with this product. If you heard about it and looking for the actual service provider, let's find out who might be the best.
Open-Xchange overview
Open-Xchange Server is an open source project sponsored by Open-Xchange, Inc., developing collaboration software; i.e. email, calendaring, address book, etc. The company was established in 2000 to provide a Linux-based, open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange. From the last year's stats, the product users are over 42 million and is growing fast.
What's good of Open-Xchange?
The OX is Java backend, it can be deployed as a single-instance server or as a scalable, fault-tolerant cluster providing up to several million virtual instances of Open-Xchange Server for many tenants concurrently. Users be able to access email accounts via the popular mail clients such as outlook, thunderbird, mobiles or the Ajax based web UI.
Open-Xchange is available as 4 options from the free community edition to advanced server edition. There will always a suitable one to fulfill your business requirements.
| OX Editions | Advanced Server Edition | Server Edition | Hosting Edition | Community Edition |
| Description | A completely self-contained "out-of-the-box" email and Smart Collaboration™ solution and a multi-tier, small footprint solution that integrates seamlessly into customers architectures enabling smooth start of operation based on flexible services with Enterprise Linux distribution, identity management and Infrastructure management. | It is a multi-tier, small footprint solution that integrates seamlessly into customers architectures enabling smooth start of operation based on flexible services. | It is a multi-tier, small footprint solution that integrates seamlessly into software service providers’ architectures enabling delivery of a Smart Collaboration™ SaaS | Open-Xchange offers a Community Edition for free download and full functional evaluation versions of all supported Open-Xchange products. |
Top Open-Xchange Hosting Providers?
1&1 is the first group who integrated OX for email hosting solution. The service is known as 1&1 MailXchange on their official website. The recent industry news shows the big name endurance International Group (EIG) will offer OX email service to their clients as well. That means a long list of hosting brands will be offering this service such as powweb, ipower, ipage, fatcow etc. almost one hundred names there. Some other popular names are Network solutions, Namecheap and NetArt.
If you're keen on open-xchange and looking for a decent hosting provider, ipage (http://www.ipage.com)is the best choice today bsed their price, hosting features and tech support. Their price $1.99/mo is simply unbeatable over all competitors. iPage open-xchange hosting plan features:
- FREE domain name
- Unlimited websites /databases support
- Unlimited email accounts /ftp accounts support
- 99% uptime guarantee
- Any time money back guarantee
- Only $1.99/mo!
Open-Xchange vs Smartermail vs MailEnable vs cpanel email
Is Open-Xchange better than smartermail or other mail softwares? Well, that all depends. OX is gaining popularity only in recent peirods while the other names have been leading the industry for a long time. But all of them have independent advantages and be able to get their own business.
Smartermail is perfect choice for windows mail server solution, light weight but never disappoint us with the powerful management over all email related services. It's developed via the latest MS asp.net technologies and only available for windows version.
MailEnable is similar to smartermail which is more affordable solution, it's mainly designed for small business purpose.
The Cpanel add-on email services are Squirrel mail, Horde and Roundcube, They would be the main competitors to OX because they're all Linux based. While we need to pay a bit money for OX service, the cPanel mail is completely free. Unless the OX will be developed to integrate with Cpanel directly with more attractive features, it's hard to gain cpanel business. As we see, the main users of OX are not cpanel based.