Overview
Intermedia has been around since 1995 and promises that they are the number one U.S. provider of hosted Exchange and Web hosting for businesses, small or mid-sized. They are based out of New York City with offices in California.
Pros: The company offers plans for small, medium and large businesses with differently-sized and priced mailboxes for each. Depending on what kind of Exchange server you’re looking for and how many people you need mailboxes for, Intermedia offers low monthly plans with no cancellation fees. You also get immediate signup and activation, and the set-up fee is waived for small businesses of less than 10 people. The plans also include nice features like free Outlook 2007 and 24/7 tech support and uptime guarantee.
Cons: As the number of people on the plan goes up, you will have to pay elevated plan fees and set-up fees of between $125 and $575. As well, if you want to add extra mailboxes to the plan, it will cost you extra, although the fee is low. Intermedia does offer optional features for each plan, but you might change your mind when you see the fees per mailbox. Although Intermedia does give a maximum attachment size of 50 MB for their emails, other companies will have a cap, so attachments that big may never reach people you are trying to email.
Detailed Provider Information:
Version of BES: (Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino, Novell Group Wise) Intermedia uses Microsoft Exchange 2010.
Plans and Pricing: Intermedia offers three plans for small businesses. The 3 Mailbox Plan offers three mailboxes with 5GB of storage each for $32.85 per month. The 10 Mailbox Plan offers 10 mailboxes with 5GB of storage each for 109 dollars per month, or 2GB for $108.50. The 25 Mailbox Plan offers 25 mailboxes with 5GB of storage each for 275 dollars per month, or 2GB for $267.50. Additional mailboxes, with 1GB of storage, can be added for $11.95 per month each for all small business plans. BES costs an additional $9.95 per user, and incurs a startup fee of $19.95.
Customers looking for Enterprise level hosting can choose from similar plans. All of the Enterprise plans include 50MB of Windows SharePoint storage, and come with 25MB mailboxes. The 3 Mailbox plan costs $38.95 per month, the 10 Mailbox plan costs $129, and the 25 Mailbox plan costs $320.
Intermedia also offers enterprise exchange hosting, covering plans with 50, 100, 200, 500, and 1,000 mailboxes. Potential enterprise customers should contact Intermedia directly for a quote.
Firewall Protection: Intermedia provides anti-virus and anti-spam protection that comes free with every plan.
Anti-Spam and Virus Protection: Intermedia includes free anti-virus and anti-spam protection with each of its plans. These are continuously maintained and updated by Intermedia itself. As well, Intermedia promises that you won’t experience a slowdown in email service because the anti-virus clustered servers are separate from the email server. The anti-spam protection works with Outlook or Entourage 2007 and implements a two-tier quarantine system, where spam email is either deleted or put in the Junk folder.
Set-up Fee: There is no setup fee for any of the small business plans.
Other Devices Supported: Besides BlackBerry, Intermedia supports Treo, Motorola Q, Nokia E61 and HTC smartphones. As well, it also supports Apple’s iPhone. On their Website, they have a full list of supported devices.
Customer Service: Businesses with plans are given 24/7 tech service and support by Intermedia’s MS-Gold certified expert staff. Your Exchange server is constantly maintained and updated.
Backup History Storage: For a fee, the Intermedia engineers will back up your email and data nightly. They make sure that you will never lose any data permanently and will ship hard copies of your data on removable media on request. For a mailbox with 1.7 GB of data, the price is $9.95. It’s $34.95 for mailboxes with more than 1.7 GB of data. There is also a $25 shipping and handling fee. For plans without this extra feature, Intermedia stores 7 days of backup history.
Uptime Guarantee: For all plans, Intermedia offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which is listed in the Service Level Agreement.
Additional Services: Users can add services to their plans like Good Mobile Messaging, ActiveSync, Spam Stopper, SharePoint Services, Email Compliance and Migration.
For Good Mobile Messaging, you will have to pay $19.95 a month, with a $19.95 set-up fee. However, you are offered quite a few features, such as easy set-up, full integration and a fully-managed service. ActiveSync is $2.95 a month and has no set-up fee. With this service, you can manage your devices from inside your Web mail or Intermedia’s control panel. Email Compliance, with three different features at different prices per month, allows you to monitor your employees’ email and keep them productive. Spam Stopper is a comprehensive program that protects your system and email from spam and harmful spyware. It costs $1 a month. You can also choose to move your email to your Intermedia Exchange server to keep everything in order.
Fee to Change BlackBerry for Current Customers: There is no charge for this service.
-advertisement-
We recently switched over to www.Intermedia.net from another provider and so far we're very happy with our decision. With the help of their support staff the migration was painless.
I've been with Intermedia for almost a year and their service has been awesome. they host our email in the office and on my phone and it works like a dream.
Absolutly Hosrrible.. Down again.. so far 6 hours!
This is from their status page:
Currently some customers hosted on server EXVMBX016-5 may experience issues when accessing e-mail. Some of the mailbox databases were corrupted. Our System Administrators are restoring data at the moment, so your mailbox might be unavailable for a while. The whole restoration process should be completed within the next 3-4 hours. No data will be lost during the restoration. All incoming messages are queued on the mail filter servers and will be delivered to the mailboxes once the mailboxes are restored.
I've been with them for over a year. I have no issues with them. The service is excellent and you can easily get someone on the phone if you need help. They lost 1 star because they are expensive and there are many hidden costs such as the service comes with anti-SPAM, but it is worthless. If you want their premium anti-SPAM (the one that works) you have to pay extra.
I was with Intermedia for a year and the service is good however I decided to switch provider because I also found that their pricing was a lot higher than most of the competitors in the industry.
Their service is too homegrown without many of the industry standards. Plus who wants to pay setup fees for basic services. The seem better than Microsoft Online Services, but not as good as MailStreet or others.
I decided to try Intermedia with a small client as a test. I have to say this is one of the worst experiences I've ever had. After 24 hours of working with them, they still don't have an email bounce-back issue resolved which is preventing my client from getting any email. The problem is clearly on their end, at least according to the email headers. They finally acknowledged this last night.
Also, their customer service line is too busy to accept calls. They assigned an account number to my client that's not recognized by their system so we can't directly call tech support. Their website won't allow access to some pages because they think we need IE6 or above when we're running IE8 on Windows 7.
And yes, there's much more. Avoid this company like the plague.