Email Hosting Providers Benchmark: Google Workspace

The management of professional business emails is a key activity. 
This is proven by the fact that in addition to Microsoft, another American big tech also comes up with a broadly similar solution. Today, in fact, we will examine the email hosting service proposed by Google. 

Each publication in this series contains relevant information that can be used independently. However, it is recommended that you read the entire series in order to grasp all the useful information and use it to your advantage! If you haven’t already done so, I recommend you take a look at the previous chapters in the series:

1. Why You Should Manage Your Customers’ Emails
2. 7 Best Practices in Selling and Managing Professional Emails
3. Email Hosting Providers Benchmark: Dedicated Mail Server
4. Email Hosting Providers Benchmark: Web Hosting Provider’s Email Accounts
5. Email Hosting Providers Benchmark: Microsoft 365

In order to make a neutral comparison that is actually useful for choosing the most suitable service for your needs, we will compare 5 categories of alternates on the market. We analyse for each of them the 7 most important characteristics that an email hosting service should have.

The seven aspects on which the comparative analysis will be based are:

1. Reseller mode of use. What features are available? Is it user-friendly? What possibilities / opportunities / threats are there for the reseller?
2. Security and Deliverability. These are the fundamental requirements for an email service. If they are not at an adequate level, all other features lose their meaning.
3. Help Desk. How can you handle the support requests from your customers that you will inevitably receive?
4. Migration Tools. When you acquire a new customer, you will probably have to carry out a migration, which if not handled properly can become an annoying niggle.
5. Backup services. Nowadays, backup services are essential and must be taken into account when evaluating an email hosting service.
6. Email account size. Your customers certainly have different needs when it comes to mailbox capacity. How much flexibility do the various providers offer you?
7. Price and costs. It is no coincidence that this is the last point, you should not even consider it. But since I am sure it is of interest to you anyway, let’s talk about it.

The five alternatives we will compare are:

1. Dedicated Mail Server
2. Web Hosting Providers’ Email Accounts
3. Microsoft 365
4. Google Workspace 
5. Qboxmail 

Google Workspace

Reseller mode of use

Along the same lines as Microsoft 365, Google Workspace gives access to a multitude of services offered by the Mountain View company. 
Workspace is, however, a service aimed mainly at the end customer. In fact, the administration panel is very user-friendly to give anyone with a minimum of familiarity with web applications the possibility of self-managing the services offered by Google. 
It is also possible to resell the service, managing customers from a single interface called Console Partner Sales, which, however, has more the function of a billing collector than of actual management of services. 
This choice probably stemmed from a careful policy of protecting the data and privacy of service users. This is a welcome choice, but one that puts the reseller in a position of billing manager, rather than service provider. 
The customers who use Workspace are Google’s customers and not yours, so if you resell Workspace your first competitor will be Google itself! 

Security and Deliverability 

Lets look at some data. There are just over 4 billion e-mail users in the world, Google alone, thanks to its free ‘@gmail.com’ mailboxes, has just under 2 billion active users. 
This means that half of the world’s e-mail traffic passes through Google’s servers. This impressive amount of information also contains all the spam messages, and all the viruses that travel via email. 
Thanks to the possibility of analysing all this data, Google is among the best when it comes to security and deliverability, but also sets the industry standard. At the same time, their servers are also the main source of spam e-mails, and on industry discussion groups the debate on whether Google does enough to limit the outgoing spam from their servers is always open.
It would be nice if they also made an effort to respect the privacy of their users, but maybe I am asking too much. 

Help Desk 

The Google Workspace administration panel gives access to an analysis section that allows you to view and download many useful reports for the help desk. For instance, analysis of the domain’s exposure to data breaches, reports on the use of the various applications of the Google universe by the organisation, or even a very useful tool for analysing email logs. 
It is a pity that all these functions are not accessible from the reseller’s panel (Console Partner Sales), but only from the domain administration panel, in the hands of the end customer (usually an internal IT Manager of the customer). 
Therefore, the reseller cannot benefit from the presence of these functions. The only thing you will be able to do is to act as an intermediary between your customer and the Google support centre, which is understandable, since Google is a large multinational and needs a lot of support staff. In this case, you become one of them. 

Backup Services

With Workspace, Google offers a proprietary message archiving solution called Google Vault. This service is also only available as a paid option via the user-side administration panel.

Size of email accounts

Google’s storage logic is different from other providers. 
Having Drive as a service included in Workspace, the space available is for both mails and files on Drive. 
The ‘business starter’ plan starts with 30GB of total storage, but already by the second plan of their offer the space increases to 2TB. As mentioned above, it is a different solution, which is certainly very attractive for large companies that have to manage and share a large amount of data. 

Pricing and costs

Pricing and margin strategies for resellers are very similar to those of Microsoft. Omni-comprehensive offer, high prices (or appropriate for large companies, not SMEs) and low margins for resellers. 
Again, does your company develop a product that is designed to integrate with Google’s services? Because if not, the advantages in reselling their services are all in Google’s favour.