For many hosting providers, email has been running quietly in the background for years, often on the original hardware. But customer expectations — and technology — have changed. If your email platform hasn’t evolved, you are missing opportunities to improve performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
Here are seven common ways providers are still doing email wrong.
1. Still running email like it’s 2000
Many providers still run email on physical servers with local disks, treating storage and compute as a single, static unit. It works — until it doesn’t. Scaling becomes painful, hardware failures are disruptive, and maintenance eats into uptime.
A better way:
Separate compute and storage layers, and design for scalability and maintainability from the start. Virtualized or containerized deployments on modern infrastructure allow you to scale horizontally and recover faster from failures.
2. Not using object storage
Object storage has transformed how large-scale email environments handle data. It offers virtually unlimited scalability, durability, and cost efficiency, especially compared to traditional file systems.
A better way:
Use object storage as the backend for mailbox data. It’s ideal for massive storage environments, reduces operational overhead, and will lower your long-term storage costs dramatically.
3. Not using Full Text Search (FTS)
Search is one of the most frequent and resource-intensive operations in email — and users expect instant results. Without a dedicated full text search index, every query hits the mailbox data directly, creating load spikes and frustration. Depending on your storage setup, FTS may be necessary to overcome I/O and latency limitations.
A better way:
Implement Full Text Search indexing. It offloads and accelerates searches, improving responsiveness while keeping performance predictable — even at large scale.
4. Doing backups manually
Manual or script-based backups may have worked when you had a few servers — but at scale, they’re a liability. They add operational risk, consume admin time, and rarely restore cleanly under pressure.
A better way:
Backup strategies depend on your storage architecture. NFS environments benefit from automated, incremental backups with regular recovery tests. For object storage, durability is ensured through replication, with application-level options available for short-term recovery.
5. Building and maintaining your own custom architecture
Many providers still maintain homegrown mail architectures that evolved over time. These become maintenance traps, locking teams into outdated designs that are hard to evolve, expensive to operate and are prone to security vulnerabilities.
A better way:
Adopt proven, modular architectures built on open standards and supported by dedicated experts. Actively maintained platforms are more secure, easier to evolve, and free your team to focus on improving services rather than keeping legacy systems alive.
6. Running only one site
Single-site setups are a single point of failure. Hardware issues, data center outages, or maintenance windows can all lead to downtime that hurts your customers and your brand.
A better way:
Design your email system for multi-site redundancy. Distribute workloads, replicate data intelligently, and ensure failover happens automatically. It’s the key to meeting expectations on service uptime.
7. Focus on designing, rather than operating and selling, email
Customers don’t choose a hosting provider for its email system design. They do, however, expect a reliable, well-operated service. Providers that focus on building and maintaining complex systems from scratch often underinvest in operations and commercialization. Yet email remains one of the most sticky and profitable services when packaged right.
A better way:
Productize email the way you would any core offering. Think through your positioning, and make it easy for customers to understand — and pay for — the value of reliable communication.
The bottom line
Email is still one of the most critical services you offer — but also one of the most undervalued. Running it efficiently and reliably is no longer about heroically maintaining legacy systems; it’s about modernizing with proven, scalable architecture.
If you recognize your setup in any of these points, it might be time to explore how others have modernized and how you could do it too.
Learn how large hosting providers use Dovecot Pro to boost performance and cut costs.
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