Intermedia services small to medium-sized businesses by providing them with cloud IT solutions, including email hosting. If you need to improve web property, email, or other internet-related performance, Intermedia can support your business ventures without requiring you to acquire on-premise servers.
Intermedia’s hosted exchange email can help you transform how you send and receive business emails through high-quality security, compliance, and onboarding. Read on to find out what this offering from Intermedia can do for your business.
Intermedia Compared
Intermedia made our top list for its powerful email security options, but it’s not the only excellent option on the market today for business email hosting. DreamHost is our best all-around pick for its versatility, user-friendliness, and affordability. Sign up for a DreamHost mailbox for just $1.67 per month.
- DreamHost — Best All-Around Email Hosting Provider
- Hostinger — Best Budget-Friendly Provider
- Intermedia — Best for Email Security
- Scala Hosting — Best for Significant Storage
- Google Workspace — Best for Google-Centric Users
- Microsoft 365 Business Standard — Best for Microsoft-Centric Users
- Amazon WorkMail — Best for AWS-Centric Users
Want to get all the details on these options? Read the full Quick Sprout post reviewing the best email hosting providers.
About Intermedia
Intermedia offers comprehensive cloud-based technology solutions for businesses of any size. The products and features they offer make it easier to scale while remaining productive and help you create unified communication channels that your whole team can benefit from.
Alongside Intermedia’s hosted exchange email service, its vast array of offerings includes file backup and management, security and compliance tools, and unified communications platforms with voice and video calling and conferencing.
Intermedia Health and Stability
Intermedia was founded in 1991 as a privately traded company with headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. Intermedia has two main investors, including Madison Dearborn Partners and NGP Capital.
Since then, Intermedia has helped more than 130,000 businesses and has hired nearly 1,000 employees across the United States. With a 4.6-star rating on Glassdoor, it seems that most Intermedia employees—past and present—are satisfied with the company’s work-life balance, remote work opportunities, and benefits. That, combined with having been in business for over 30 years, paints an encouraging portrait of Intermedia’s continued success.
Intermedia Pricing
Intermedia has separate pricing for each of the services they offer. For the sake of this post, I will be discussing just the pricing for Intermedia’s hosted exchange email platform, which has four different pricing tiers.
Intermedia Pricing Structure
You’ll find four packages for Intermedia exchange email, each charged per user per month. However, pricing is somewhat customized based on user needs, so you’ll need to get a quote from Intermedia for a precise price point.
For the most basic email plan, plans start at just under $8 monthly for each user, with higher-priced plans stretching up to a bit over $15 per user per month. Plans above the basic tier add features like archiving, additional protection, and even free access to Microsoft 365’s applications.
You can also build a plan a la carte, adding Microsoft 365, archiving, backups, encryption, or enhanced security to the basic email package for an extra fee. Intermedia also allows you to get hosted email as a part of their unified communications platform, Intermedia Unite.
Intermedia Pricing Comparison
Intermedia’s hosted exchange email service ranges from $7.94 per user per month for unlimited mailbox storage and basic email protection to as high as $15.44 per user per month to include all the bells and whistles. Mid-range plans run between $10 and $12 per user per month.
Compared to other email hosting providers, Intermedia offers decent functionality per mailbox, but that comes with a higher price tag. For example, with DreamHost, you only get 25 GB of storage (as opposed to Intermedia’s unlimited cloud storage on any plan), but you’ll only have to pay $1.67 per mailbox per month. On the other hand, Hostinger’s plans are even cheaper, starting at $0.99 per month, and grant you more than 14 powerful email features.
And, if you want to find an email hosting provider with more flexible pricing options, Scala Hosting starts at $2.95 per month and scales up to $14.95 per month for unlimited accounts and domains.
Intermedia Trials and Guarantees
Intermedia offers a 30-day risk-free trial on select plans. You can request a quote for most of its products and services or create a custom pricing package based on your needs by reaching out to an Intermedia sales representative.
Intermedia Email Hosting Review
Intermedia’s email hosting plans stand out for their powerful security features that help to provide an incredibly secure and worry-free hosted email experience. You’re also getting unlimited storage on any email plan and a 99.999% uptime guarantee via their service-level agreement.
You could benefit from Intermedia’s email hosting service if you are looking for a reliable exchange email platform that will improve the reliability and efficacy of how your business sends and receives emails. If you want to scope out other excellent alternatives, make sure to check out our reviews of all of the best email hosting providers.
What Makes Intermedia Email Hosting Great
Powerful security comes standard: Intermedia covers security by conducting SOC 3 audits of its data centers and offers PCI-DSS and general privacy protection and secure data networks. In fact, Intermedia has a security philosophy that covers seven critical facets: data security, server-side backups, endpoint protection, identity protection, infrastructure security, privacy over data, and security management. They take this seriously so your organization can have peace of mind.
Unlimited storage: Many email hosting providers don’t provide unlimited email storage unless you pay for the highest-priced plan. And if they do offer it for more budget-conscious packages, you’ll usually have to pay an additional fee for more storage space.
Fortunately, that isn’t the case with Intermedia, as it offers unlimited email storage on any plan, including its entry-level package that costs around $8 per user per month. Intermedia’s unlimited email storage ensures you don’t need to worry about the size of your inbox or the heft of attachments you’re sending and receiving.
Managed onboarding: It can be complicated to onboard your team to an entirely new email platform and migrate existing data, but that’s an issue of the past with Intermedia’s cloud concierge onboarding feature. Their expert team will work with you to create a process for implementation and onboarding that fits your business schedule and minimizes the impact migration might have on your users. Intermedia migrates over 15,000 mailboxes and 5,000 phone numbers each month, so you can rest assured that they can support your website without losing data or experiencing downtime.
99.999% uptime: One of Intermedia’s mottos is “the five nines make all the difference,” which is at the heart of their uptime-related service-level agreement (SLA). Intermedia’s 99.999% uptime SLA means you can expect less than 26 seconds of downtime per month and only a hair over five minutes of downtime per year (if you even experience that much). Intermedia helps meet this lofty standard by allowing its Microsoft-certified architects and engineers to build and customize its tech infrastructure and world-class data centers.
Compliance features: If you are looking for an email hosting provider that understands and supports your need to meet certain regulatory requirements, Intermedia will impress you. With Intermedia’s hosted exchange email, you can maintain financial regulatory compliance and HIPAA compliance for protected health information. Not only that, but Intermedia can help you comply with additional regulations, including GDPR, FINRA, NASD, and SEC, to name a few.
Where Intermedia Email Hosting Falls Short
Not user-friendly: The bulk of Intermedia’s criticisms involve its interface not being as user-friendly as other email hosting providers. Many users found the UI clunky and hard to navigate. And, not having access to shortcuts within the inbox makes it difficult to find files and data when you need them in a snap.
Poor customer service: While it’s excellent that Intermedia offers 24/7 technical support, many of its users felt that their customer service didn’t live up to the claims on its website. Many reviewers found that the customer representatives were slow to respond, unhelpful, and some were even rude. It’s worth putting their service team through its paces on the 30-day trial period to make sure you won’t experience the same underwhelming support.
Slow mobile app: Intermedia’s mobile app is heavily outdated, with its 3.3-star rating on the Google Play Store showing that a lot of users aren’t happy with the product. Many reviewers claim that the app is slow and often lags when you attempt to complete a task. More inconveniently, the app lacks many of the basic features included in Intermedia’s email plans, such as notifications and group messages.
Intermedia Email Hosting Compared
While Intermedia offers powerful security regulations and unlimited email storage, the best email hosting provider on the market today is DreamHost because of its versatility and affordability.
- DreamHost — Best All-Around Email Hosting Provider
- Hostinger — Best Budget-Friendly Provider
- Intermedia — Best for Email Security
- Scala Hosting — Best for Significant Storage
- Google Workspace — Best for Google-Centric Users
- Microsoft 365 Business Standard — Best for Microsoft-Centric Users
- Amazon WorkMail — Best for AWS-Centric Users
Final Verdict
Intermedia is a decent email hosting provider that services small to medium-sized businesses with cloud-based technology. With powerful security regulations, unlimited email storage, and a concierge onboarding feature, Intermedia can help you build a stable email network and business structure.
With more than 30 years in the industry and helping more than 130,000 businesses across the globe, it’s clear that Intermedia is a reliable company that aims to provide cloud-based solutions for easier communication.