Options For Running Website Hosting and Email For Your Home Services Business

Let's talk about email hosting options for a minute and the three different options you've got, and how you can probably best configure your email for your business.

I'm Vossey from LeadFuse, and in this particular video, we are just going to talk about the three different email options you have for running your business.

So email is still essential to most businesses. I don't know a business owner who doesn't rely on email hosting. And there are essentially three different ways of running email for your small business.

1. Option 1 is hosting your website in one place and then using Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo Mail or whatever else it is that you want to use as your email operating system.
2. Then there is running your hosting account and your email in the same package.
3. And then there's option three, which is hosting your website as you do in options one and two — but running email separately on a different place using a professional email system. And I want to talk about all three of those systems and the pros and cons.

So let's just cut to the chase. We recommend option three, running your website in one place and your email on a proper hosted website solution in a different area.

I'll go through the pros and cons of each of them, so you can understand why we make this recommendation.

Website Hosting and Free Email Tools

First of all, running your website hosting at one place and then using Hotmail or Gmail or some other sort of email address that's coming up as a separate thing. So not ending in your business domain name.

Pros

The Pros of that.

The email doesn't mess with the hosting, the interfaces like Hotmail and Gmail in particular. I particularly like Outlook as well.

They have an excellent user interface, and you can easily use them on multiple devices. And they're straightforward to set up and operate, and most of them allow for many integrations. So you can connect up calendars, you can connect up booking calendars and lots of stuff like that, and they all have very good security and manage spam very well.

Cons

But the cons are it just doesn't look professional to have a domain name, e.g. my business over here, and then the email account george@gmail.com doesn't work very well.

Yeah, it's free, but it's free at a cost because you're the product. So, for example, if you're using Gmail, Google can read everything that goes on in your Gmail. They don't read it personally, but they scan through it and make that information available as a profile. And if you're using Google Docs and all that other stuff, then it's the same issue.

You end up being the product. They read your Google Docs and look at your Google photos and all that kind of stuff to get a profile of you. So it's free, but it's at a cost.

And also, they're not around forever. I mean, Hotmail still exists. Yahoo mail is pretty much gone. Rocketmail's gone.

Gmail is likely to be there for a while, but it's rented ground. You don't own it; you don't have the rights to it. And someday, or rather, you'll find that it ends up disappearing and that you have no longer have access to all the old emails.

Run Website Hosting And Email On The One Hosting Account

The second option is to combine the two and run the website and the email on the hosting.

Pros

It's the cheapest option in the short term. It looks professional because your email comes from the same place as your domain name, and you own it. You have control over it.

Cons

But there are lots of issues with doing it this way—the security issues for a start.

So email just about always email is the thing that gets hacked first. For example, it starts someone's email account gets hacked because they have a weak password or they open some email, it's a phishing email or whatever. Then that email gets hacked. Then they start spamming, and the website and the rest of the email accounts get taken down. So everything goes down at once, and you don't have very many options there.

You get hacked website leads to hacked email. So you've got all sorts of issues around that. And the most significant single problem that I find we get is that a business owner will create a signature, and it's got a little logo in it, or maybe even a bigger image with some stuff on it. And that constant sending (and receiving) of that little logo, that small image attached to their email over time, fills up the hosting space because it does become quite a lot of content in the thing.

And then you end up having to pay more for your hosting because your email space use is more extensive, and the boxes and the amount of email it takes.

Email on the server has poor deliverability. We regularly come across problems where clients say they're not getting my invoices or not getting my emails.

And that kind of stuff happens because email or hosting is where spammers go. They buy a domain name, they buy a hosting account and run email spam. And anything that goes on on that hosting account, and generally, you're on shared hosting, will impact on your deliverability.

So if somebody else is spamming and you happen to be on the same IP address or the same host, you have the same problem, your emails will get blacklisted, and the deliverability will go down.

You'll get lots of spam because the spam filters and the interface for the web email aren't very good, and you get lots of spam coming through to you.

And they're a bit complicated to set up on email readers, and you have very few integrations. So it's the cheapest option in the short term, but it's not one I recommend that you go within the long run.

Run Website Hosting And Use A Professional Standalone Email Tool

The third option is to run your website on your hosting and then run your email via your domain name but on a proper email solution.

Pros

 So this means that the customers get your professional email address. The email doesn't mess with your hosting account storage. You get an excellent user interface. It's easy to set up like Gmail.

There are lots of integrations, excellent security, excellent spam filtering. It looks professional, and you get all the other benefits that you get from, say, Google workspace like Google Docs and Google Present and all the other things that come with Google Workspacelike Google Docs and Doc sharing and web conferencing and that kind of stuff.

Cons

The only real con is that it costs a bit more.

Recommendation

So we recommend that you keep your domain in one place and run your email on a professional email.

So then here are three that I recommend. I'm not very set on one or the other. Whatever works best for you.

I use Google Workspace, but you could use Google Workspace, Office 365 or Zohomail.

They all work well and give you the benefits of having a good email and your website hosting separately.