Don’t be a Dummy Keep Website and Email Separate

Why should you do this?

For 4 very good reasons:

1.) If your website hosting goes down so does your email

Even if you are not an internet expert you have definitely come across a website that has been down. Website attacks that overwhelm and block a website from being seen are all too often!

However, can you remember the last time your email provider such as Gmail, Outlook, Zoho etc were down?

Its common knowledge that a website is a lot more likely to go down than your email.

If you have associated your emails with your website hosting company just so you can have that all important name@businessname.co.uk guess what?

If your website goes down, your emails will also stop working!

That’s not great for business because I suspect email is essential for your business operations (it definitely is for me and my clients).

Customers, suppliers and everyone else wont be able to visit your website but worse still they wont be able to get in touch with you.

Can you imagine the effect this will have on your suppliers, clients, business partners and the rest.

You can have a business email, just keep website and email providers separate

However, if you had separated your email from your website hosting you would be able to carry on with business, keeping in contact with your suppliers, clients and business partners. Heck you can even take the proactive step of letting them know that you are currently experiencing problems with your website (which I’m sure they will appreciate).

You should also make sure that you have at least one other social media channel such as Facebook or Twitter just so you can let everyone know you are experiencing problems with your website and that you are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible (good customer service).

2.) Moving your website means moving your email.
Bad news, it’s not that easy!

Although moving a website has some technicalities it is still relatively straight forward.

• You buy new hosting from another hosting company,
• instruct your web developer to push and pull the technical levers to finish this off
• move your files to that new hosting company,
• cancel or let your old hosting run out,
• and your website continues to run.

Unfortunately, if your email is also linked to your website hosting it can and is a pain to move your email address and all of your past emails across with it.

You could find yourself up the creek without a paddle and losing all of your previous emails. Plus, just to let you know, web developers do not really like doing this either.

By hosting your emails with another email provider all you have to do at initial setup is point incoming emails at the domain registrar to the email provider that stores them. If you decide to move your website hosting from the registrar or from another hosting company you do not have to do anything with your emails. They will continue as normal.

Plus if you decide to change your domain registrar as well (sometimes because your domain renewal is more expensive) all you would have to do is change where the incoming emails point to at your new domain registrar. Your past emails remain where they are at the email provider (this is much less work, therefore costing you less or you can do it yourself if you have the technical ability).

3.) Hosting your email with your website uses up valuable space

Having your email through your website hosting company uses up valuable website storage space. Space that you should be using for your website to add photos, extra pages and new blog posts or announcements.

4.) The user experience with Hosted email is generally not as good

On a lesser but annoying note, using hosted email is a poorer user experience (although it has improved) compared to that of a dedicated email provider such as Gmail, Outlook and Zoho to name but a few.

Most people have difficulty learning new ways of doing things or just plain don’t like learning new things when they have a good system already. Changing website hosting providers is a common practice much more frequent than changing email providers.

Moving or losing your emails simply because you changed your website hosting to another company sucks, is a headache and costs more money. When I’m asked to move a website for a client, I want emails to carry on as normal and make the transition as easy and seamless as possible for both me and my clients.

Therefore, to avoid associated security risks, headache and cost keep your email providers separate from your hosting company.