Consolidation, Unlimited Free Storage Heat Up Market

Server

The end-user cost of $12.95 per mailbox per month, which already includes antispam and antivirus, now also covers unlimited storage. Most hosted Exchange providers offer storage limits of 200 Mbytes to 500 Mbytes.

OEMs and resellers can private-label the AppRiver service for their own customers. AppRiver is based in Gulf Breeze, Fla.

In related news, Intermedia.net, which also provides hosted Exchange through VARs, earlier this month raised the base storage of its Private Label Exchange Hosting to 500 Mbytes per mailbox. Options available to resellers also include a bundle of 1-Gbyte and 2-Gbyte mailbox limits for $11.50 and $14.50 per month, respectively.

Last month, another competitor, Apptix, bought Mi8 to broaden its own hosted Exchange Server offerings.

id
unit-1659132512259
type
Sponsored post

This flurry of activity comes as Microsoft preps its self-hosted Office Live and Windows Live offerings to consumers and very small businesses. Office Live Essentials, for example, includes e-mail and other goodies.

But Google may have set the price-cutting in motion last year with its free consumer-oriented gMail service that offered at that time an unprecedented 1 Gbyte—which was later increased to 2 Gbytes and then 2.5 Gbytes—of storage. One of its main selling points was that users would never have to delete e-mail again. Ironically, bloggers now attest that they've hit even that limit.

The nascent Google Apps For Your Domain offers instant messaging and e-mail to small businesses, and industry observers expect Google to add its Writely word processor and Google Spreadsheet to that mix as well. Such an array of free services is of major concern to application hosting providers, especially those that target small businesses.