Email hosting or Microsoft 365: which suits a small office?

Most small offices in Malaysia pick one of two setups for company email: email hosting on your own domain from a local provider, or Microsoft 365, which bundles email with Word, Excel and Teams. Both use your own @company.com.my address. The right choice depends on whether your staff need the Office apps, how much mail they keep and who will look after it.

What do you get with Microsoft 365?

Microsoft 365 Business plans are licensed per user and are meant for up to 300 users. According to Microsoft's service descriptions:

• Business Basic and Business Standard give each user a 100 GB mailbox and a 50 GB archive mailbox.
• Business Basic includes the web and mobile versions of the Office apps only. Business Standard and Business Premium add the desktop apps.
• Every cloud mailbox gets Microsoft's built-in spam and malware filtering. High confidence phishing mail is always quarantined.

If your team already lives in Excel, Teams and OneDrive, paying per user for Microsoft 365 often makes sense, because email comes with tools you would buy anyway.

What do you get with email hosting?

Email hosting gives you mailboxes on your domain that work in Outlook, on phones and in webmail, without the Office apps. Plans are often sized by total storage instead of a fee for each user. That suits offices with shared addresses such as sales@ or accounts@, part-time staff, or a few people who keep years of mail.

Spam filtering varies by provider. Ask whether mail passes through a filter before it reaches the inbox, and whether you can see and release quarantined mail yourself.

Which one fits your office?

Some offices mix the two, for example Microsoft 365 for managers and hosted mailboxes for shared addresses. That needs careful DNS setup, so plan it with your provider.

What to do

1. Count your users and shared addresses, and note who needs the desktop Office apps.
2. Check how big the largest mailboxes are today. Our guide on how much email storage a small office needs shows how.
3. Ask any provider how they will move your old mail, contacts and calendars, and on which day the switch happens.
4. Make sure SPF, DKIM and DMARC are set for your domain after the move, whichever option you choose.

How SyncTech can help

If you want hosted company email with a filter that stops spam and phishing before delivery, see our antispam email hosting for Malaysian offices. Moving to or from Microsoft 365? Our email migration service plans the cutover so no mail is lost. Wondering whether you need email hosting at all when you already have web hosting? Read this earlier guide.

Source and credit

We are sharing information from Microsoft. This summary is written by Synctech in our own words.

• Exchange Online limits, Microsoft Learn: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/exchange-online-service-description/exchange-online-limits
• Microsoft 365 and Office 365 plan options, Microsoft Learn: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/office-365-platform-service-description/office-365-plan-options
• Anti-spam protection in cloud organizations, Microsoft Learn: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-office-365/anti-spam-protection-about

Retrieved 7 November 2026. Microsoft 365, Outlook, Excel, Word, Teams and OneDrive are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Synctech is not connected with Microsoft. This is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. If anything here is wrong, email support@synctech.com.my and we will correct it.