How to Set up Email on My own Domain

Custom email may seem like a small dot in the ocean with regards to branding your business, but it’s undeniably important. What do we say about first impressions? They count. In just one glance, you can make a meaningful impact on your, clients, customers and/or acquaintances. As a general rule of thumb, use a custom email address to give your business legitimacy, whereas a standard (e.g. @gmail.com) email is more appropriate for your personal stuff.

Creating a custom email address is similar to how you go about building your website. First, you need to pick an email platform to use, then install it to your custom domain. Let’s imagine Jamie’s bike shop. Shop owner Jamie wanted to distinguish himself from his rivals with a professional email address.

To set up a custom email address that matched his domain, Jamie would pick an email host. An email host will arrange that Jamie can email from jamie@jamiesbike.shop. Each host will offer a slightly different set of features, a different interface to access emails (a webmail client), and a range of prices.

Can I Host My Email on My Own Server?

Email hosting and web hosting are similar in the sense that neither has to be hosted by your registrar or web host providers. Emails can be routed to different servers and the routing is handled by entries in the DNS (Domain Name System) records.

By updating DNS records, it’s possible to direct different types of traffic to different servers. Making entries to CNAME records for example will create sub-domains to route traffic to different servers and/or services such as calendar, email and shared documents.

If you choose to host your own email, you’re going to need… a server. The fun doesn't stop there. Your server needs someone who knows how to manage it, so you'll want extra staff. Probably someone with an IT degree. And that's not all. You also need to consider:

◉ The expense of hardware
◉ Limited network capacity
◉ Storage limits
◉ Software licenses

The responsibility of backing up your email data. In addition to the labor costs involved in all this, these are just a few of the reasons that most businesses opt for the services of a professional email host, as opposed to running their own in-house server.

There are many challenges linked to in-house servers, including insufficient security, failed backups, difficulty syncing messages across multiple devices (desktop computers, tablets, and cell phones). These are things which can spell disaster for a business. Luckily, there are many alternatives available to avoid the challenges mentioned above.

There is a lot to be gained from choosing a hosted email provider rather than managing this yourself. With the number of options available today, there is a good fit out there for any size of business. It wouldn’t cost much to launch, but the time it takes to set one up, and effectively managing the console are the obvious reasons for subscribing to a service, instead of launching an email server of your own.

With a hosted email service, you don’t need to purchase any hardware, and it’s unlikely that you will have any software to set up. Setting up email hosting with a hosting provider is easy, you just need basic computer literacy and should be able to set the server up without much trouble.