In this post, I’ll be covering whether you should be using your website hosting to also host your business email. Or, whether you should use an independent email service provider.

If you are looking to set up email addresses using your domain name, there are lots of options available to get this done. It is common to see website hosting companies also including business emails for free with the website hosting package. When I got started this is exactly what I did, as it was free and I did not foresee any issues in doing so.

However, I now don’t use website hosting to also do emails and I don’t recommend that you do so either. This is because I have run into a number of issues or challenges which caused me to rethink this.

Email setups can be complicated and confusing

Here’s the thing, email configuration can be extremely complicated and complex if you try to self-host your business emails. This is exactly what you do when you decide to put your emails on a website hosting plan. 

You are in charge of doing the setup and the trouble shooting if it stops working. 

Don’t get me wrong, It is pretty straightforward to set up your email accounts and so on, but it can get more complicated than that if you are inexperienced. 

Here’s where the main problems come in:

• If your website hosting service goes down, your emails will stop working as well as they are all tied together. 
• If you ever decide to move your website to a new hosting service, your email accounts and emails won’t automatically transfer to the new host. You’ll have to basically set up every email address again and you run the risk of losing your previous emails as their isn’t a straightforward way to just transfer them.

If you are ok with dealing with this, then you should be fine to go ahead and use the website hosting service also for your emails.

For everyone else, I recommend using a service that is separate and independent of your website hosting. The way these email services are setup, solves the above problems as they are not affected by what happens on your website.

What business email service should you use?

I recommend G Suite or Zoho Mail if you are looking for a clean and elegant solution. 

G Suite is basically a paid version of Gmail which means you can access it via your web browser and through mobile apps. The service also comes with some additional benefits such as cloud storage and other features.

Zoho Mail gives you a nice email setup and you can start for free or go to the paid plan if you need more features. They also have web browser access and a mobile app.

Both services offer great customer support, so you don’t have to deal with the headaches if things go wrong with your email service.

There you have it, that’s my take on setting up your business email service.