Business email on your own domain: Workspace vs 365 vs hosting

You can have the best website in Essex and still lose the job when the quote arrives from daveplumbing1987@gmail.com. Customers notice. They may not say so, but a free address reads as “side hustle” and a domain address reads as “business”. This guide explains how to get dave@daveplumbing.co.uk, compares the three realistic ways to run it, and walks through switching without losing a single message.

Why it matters more than it seems

• Trust. A domain address matches your website, your van and your invoices. It says the business exists beyond one person’s phone.
• Deliverability. Properly configured domain email with SPF, DKIM and DMARC records lands in the inbox. Mail from free accounts sending on behalf of a business increasingly lands in spam.
• Ownership. If a staff member leaves, you keep sales@. If a free account gets locked, the business is cut off. We have seen both.
• Looks like you mean it. Tenders, trade accounts and some suppliers quietly require a company address.

The address is tied to your domain name, which you should already own. Email is separate from your website: you can host the site with us and the mail with Google, and most of our clients do exactly that.

The three options

There are many email providers, but for a UK small business it comes down to three choices.

Google Workspace

For most of the businesses we work with, this is the right answer. The Gmail interface is the one people already know, the spam filtering is the best there is, the phone apps are good, and shared calendars and Drive come along for the ride. The entry plan (Business Starter) is enough for almost everyone. The one real downside is that per-user pricing adds up if you want ten addresses for a team of two; the fix is to use aliases (free extra addresses on one mailbox) rather than separate users.

Microsoft 365

Choose this if your working day is Outlook, Word and Excel, if you share files with larger companies that live in Teams, or if you have an IT support firm that already manages Microsoft accounts. Business Basic gives you the mailbox and web versions of Office; Business Standard adds the desktop apps. Setup is slightly more involved than Google’s and the admin centre is less friendly, but it is a very good service.

Email included with your hosting

cPanel hosting, including our Standard plan, can create mailboxes on your domain for free. It works, and for an info@ that forwards to your main inbox, or a business that sends a handful of emails a week, it is fine. The problems appear at scale: storage is shared with the website, spam filtering is basic, and because the server’s IP is shared with other sites, one bad neighbour can hurt your deliverability. We are honest with clients about this: if email is important to how you win work, pay the £5 a month.

How many mailboxes do you really need?

Fewer than you think. A typical two-person business needs two paid mailboxes and a handful of aliases:

• dave@ and sarah@: real mailboxes, one each.
• hello@ or info@: an alias delivered to both, so enquiries never sit in one person’s inbox while they are on holiday.
• accounts@: an alias delivered to whoever does the invoices.
• noreply@ or bookings@: for your booking system or website forms to send from. Usually an alias too.

Avoid creating a mailbox per role “just in case”. Every unused mailbox is a monthly fee and a password nobody remembers.

The DNS records that keep you out of spam

Whichever provider you choose, your domain’s DNS needs four kinds of record. The provider gives you the exact values; whoever manages your domain (us, if we registered it) adds them.

1. MX records tell the world where to deliver mail for your domain. Wrong MX records mean lost email, so change them last and carefully.
2. SPF lists the servers allowed to send mail as your domain. One TXT record. If your website also sends mail (contact form notifications, booking confirmations), its server has to be in the list too, which is a step people forget.
3. DKIM adds a cryptographic signature to each outgoing message that receivers can verify. Your provider generates the key; you publish it in DNS.
4. DMARC tells receivers what to do with mail that fails the first two checks, and where to send reports. Start with a monitoring-only policy (p=none), check the reports for a few weeks, then tighten.

Since February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo require SPF and DKIM from anyone sending to them in any volume, and Microsoft followed in 2025. A domain without them does not merely risk spam folders: some mail is rejected outright. If your emails to customers have started “not arriving”, this is the first thing to check. A health check of your website will not show it, but we check it on every hosting migration.

Switching without losing email

The order matters. Done in this sequence there is no gap and no lost mail.

1. Sign up with the new provider and verify you own the domain (a TXT record). Mail still flows to the old place at this point.
2. Create the mailboxes and aliases you decided on above.
3. Migrate the old mail. Google and Microsoft both have free tools that copy existing messages from almost any IMAP mailbox, including Gmail, Outlook.com and cPanel. Run it now; it can take hours for a large mailbox.
4. Set up devices with the new accounts while they are still empty. Confirm you can send a test to a personal address.
5. Change the MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. New mail starts arriving in the new mailboxes within an hour or so, though some senders cache the old records for up to a day.
6. Run the migration again a day later to catch anything that arrived at the old mailbox during the overlap.
7. Keep the old account alive for a month, checking it weekly, then close it.

Moving away from a free address

If you have been trading from a Gmail or BT address for years, customers and suppliers have it saved. You cannot flip a switch, but you can manage the transition:

• Set the old account to forward everything to the new address, and leave it that way for at least a year.
• Set an auto-reply on the old account: “This address is no longer monitored. Please email dave@daveplumbing.co.uk.” Most mail apps will update the contact automatically when people reply.
• Update the address everywhere it is printed or listed: Google Business Profile, Facebook, invoices, email signatures, Checkatrade or similar directories, your bank, HMRC, your accountant.
• Email your regular customers once from the new address to say it has changed. It is also a good excuse to get in touch.

Common mistakes we fix

• The website form sends from the customer’s address. A form that sets “From: customer@gmail.com” fails SPF and gets filtered. Forms should send from an address on your own domain and put the customer in Reply-To. All sites we build do this.
• Someone else owns the Workspace account. A departed web designer or an ex-employee set it up with their own login. Make sure the “super admin” is you, now, while everyone is still friendly.
• Catch-all addresses. Accepting mail to anything@yourdomain feels convenient and becomes a spam magnet within weeks. Use specific aliases instead.
• No second admin. If one person is locked out and there is no recovery, the business is locked out. Add a second admin or a recovery phone.

What we do for clients

When we build or host a site we set up the email side as part of it: choose a provider with you, create the mailboxes and aliases, add the DNS records correctly, point the website’s forms and booking confirmations at a proper sending address, and move your old mail across. It is a couple of hours of careful work and it removes a quiet, constant drag on how professional the business looks. If you are still on a free address, tell us the domain and we will send you a plan and a fixed price.