Frequently Asked Question
You can purchase storage for your private virtual from 1GB to 5TB, but there are many reasons why trying to keep it low is preferable.
For enterprise email, you can allocate the server storage quota to mailboxes as required, but simply allocating massive mailboxes presents challenges to clients, security and retention.
The larger the mailbox, the slower the client will become, and this varies between systems but they are all affected to some degree, especially mobile devices.
The larger the mailbox, the greater the security risk should an account be compromised.
The larger the mailbox, the greater the risk of loss should there be a technical issue, or should someone accidentally delete it, or bulk erase, etc.
You can configure mailboxes to self-delete email older than a set period for any that are non-critical, or optionally purchase a GEN hosted email backup service, which will create a periodic backup of all email, then remove it from the mailboxes, or use your own hosted service to download and purge email via imap, or for smaller configurations, a single client on a PC can be used to archive email (by setting up all mailboxes on that machine, and setting up auto-archive).
Whichever you choose, keeping mailboxes below 5GB should be the aim.
Data
Storing large amounts of data on your hosted database(s) presents a clear risk should your front end system be compromised. As a policy, only store the information that is required for the daily operation of your solution, archiving or purging everything else. GEN Again have a dedicated datalake platform which can be leveraged to offload data, or you can download it periodically using some front-end applications.
Web
The larger the website the slower it will be rendered to visitors, and since images often form the bulk of the storage, optimising these brings with it many advantages. There are tools to do this available both online and in software, or again GEN offer an image refactoring service.
Advice
As a GEN Customer, you are afforded free advice on any of these via the HelpDesk or your Account Manager, so please make use of this anytime you need it.
