Top Must-Have Online Services for Your Business (Updated for 2026)

I wrote this in January 2010, back when “moving your business to the cloud” still sounded a little futuristic. Rereading it now, the core prediction holds up remarkably well: this stuff went from “nice to have” to simply how business gets done. I’ve kept the original advice, lightly polished, and added an updated, current-day take under each point, with specific services worth looking at today.

When I first wrote this, I said 2010 was going to be the year online applications really took off: that more and more software would move off your desktop and onto the web, bringing automatic updates (the user does nothing), professional off-site backups, and access to your files and tools from anywhere with an internet connection. Looking back from 2026, that bet turned out to be dead on. Practically everything runs in the cloud now. Here are the three services I called out back then, each brought up to date.

1. Email marketing

If you’re not using email to stay in touch with your customers, you’re missing out on one of the best tools there is. Sending campaigns from your own computer is a bad idea for a couple of reasons: it’s very hard to stay compliant with the laws that govern commercial email, and a high percentage of those messages end up in spam folders, never to be seen. Dedicated email-marketing services solve both problems. For a monthly subscription they handle the compliance side for you, and (the part that’s almost impossible to pull off on your own) they maintain sender reputation and relationships with the major inbox providers, so your messages actually reach the inbox.

In 2026: the two services I recommended back in 2010, AWeber and Constant Contact, are both still going strong all these years later. The other big names worth comparing today are Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and Kit (formerly ConvertKit). Most offer a free or low-cost starter tier and scale up as your list grows, so it’s easy to try a couple before you commit. Pricing has come down a lot since the “$19 a month to start” days, too.

2. Online backup (and cloud storage)

This one isn’t strictly an “online application,” but it runs on the same idea: a small program sits on your computer and automatically uploads your data to a provider’s servers in the background. The good services will alert you if a backup fails or can’t reach their servers for some reason. For just a few dollars a month, it buys real peace of mind and saves you the hours you’d otherwise spend making backup discs by hand.

In 2026: it’s worth separating two things that often get lumped together. Backup services quietly copy your whole computer off-site so you can recover everything after a crash, a theft, or ransomware: the big consumer names today are Backblaze, Carbonite, IDrive, and Acronis. Cloud storage, on the other hand, is built for storing, syncing, and sharing the files you use day to day, and for most people it’s both effective and economical: Google Drive (Google One), Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, and Apple iCloud all offer generous, inexpensive plans. Ideally you use both: a true backup for disaster recovery, and cloud storage for the files you touch every day. (A couple of names from the old days have moved on: Mozy was folded into Carbonite, and CrashPlan dropped its consumer plans to focus on businesses.)

3. Professional email hosting

For decades, plenty of companies ran their own email servers in house, often on Microsoft Exchange. That usually meant paying for a dedicated, full-time systems administrator, and even then, an in-house server could rarely match the reliability a commercial hosting provider can offer. Hosted email gives you message backups, a permanent record of everything sent and received, HIPAA compliance where you need it, and far less to maintain yourself.

In 2026: almost nobody runs Exchange in a back-office closet anymore: it moved to the cloud right along with everything else. The two giants are Google Workspace (business email on your own domain, tied straight into Gmail) and Microsoft 365 (Outlook with Exchange Online). If you’d rather keep things simple, a premium web host like SiteGround can provide email right alongside your website hosting. And if you want a dedicated, privacy-minded provider, Fastmail, Proton Mail, and Zoho Mail are all excellent. (One small footnote: the free “Hotmail” that existed when I first wrote this is now Outlook.com.)

Looking back from 2026

The funny thing about rereading this is how completely the question has flipped. In 2010, these were the forward-looking, “you should really consider this” services. In 2026 they’re just how business is done: running email marketing, keeping off-site backups, and using hosted email is no more remarkable now than having a phone number. The cloud didn’t just take off; it became the ground everything else stands on. If you’re curious where I think the next version of that shift is heading, I wrote about it in why AI in 2026 feels like the internet in 1996.

Regards,
Jamie Dolan