Hostway to offer hosted Exchange

New service offers firms an alternative to in-house deployment and management

Web hosting company Hostway will launch a new mobile email and collaboration service today offering Microsoft Exchange tightly integrated with Microsoft’s SharePoint.

The hosted service frees firms from the high IT management and maintenance costs of traditional in-house deployments, and they can get help from Hostway's dedicated support team, on call 24 hours a day, said the vendor's UK sales and marketing director, Neil Barton.

"Anything we do could be done by firms’ own in-house IT groups, but [firms should think of] their physical environment – servers are very hot and power-hungry," said Barton. "We also have a close relationship with Microsoft [so firms can benefit from] our bulk buying power."

Customers can access their Exchange email via Outlook web or mobile editions, and the integration with SharePoint means remote staff and distributed teams can easily collaborate on projects, said Barton.

All mailboxes come with 300MB of capacity and 50MB of public disk space. Pricing starts at £49.50 per year for one Exchange mailbox. An Exchange Mail Plus system with 3 mailboxes costs £99.50 a year.