How to set up a business email address on your own domain.

Setting up a business email address on your own domain takes about thirty minutes and costs £5 to £6 per person per month: you need a domain you control, an account with Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, and a small DNS change called an MX record that points your email to your provider. That is the whole job, and it is one of the highest-return half-hours available to a Welsh small business, because name@yourbusiness.co.uk changes how every enquiry, quote and invoice you send is received. This guide covers the honest provider choice, the setup steps in plain English, and the traps that quietly cost businesses their email later.

Why name@yourbusiness beats yourbusiness@gmail

The case is not snobbery; it is measurable trust and control. A tradesperson quoting a £5,000 job from a Gmail address is asking the customer to take more on faith than one writing from their own domain, and customers notice even when they cannot say why. Deliverability follows the same logic: mail sent from your own properly configured domain, with the authentication records providers set up as standard, lands in inboxes more reliably than free addresses that share their reputation with the whole world's spam.

The deeper reason is continuity. An email address on your own domain belongs to your business: staff addresses can be created and retired as people come and go, and if you ever change provider, the address survives the move. A personal Gmail woven into years of customer relationships belongs, in every practical sense, to whoever holds that login.

The two providers worth considering

For a small business the honest shortlist has two names. Google Workspace, roughly £5 per user a month at entry level, gives you Gmail's interface on your own domain plus Drive, Docs and Meet. Microsoft 365, from about £5 to £6, gives you Outlook plus Word, Excel and Teams. Both are excellent at email; the real decision is which suite your business already lives in.

Option	Typical cost	The honest trade-off
Google Workspace	~£5/user/month	Gmail familiarity; best if you live in Google's tools
Microsoft 365	~£5-6/user/month	Includes Office apps; best if you live in Word and Excel
Hosting-bundled mailboxes	£2-5/mailbox	Weaker product, and welds your email to your host
Free Gmail/Outlook address	£0	No domain, no continuity, credibility cost on every send

The row to avoid is the third: mailboxes sold as hosting add-ons are usually a weaker product, and they tie your inbox to your hosting company, which is exactly the dependency our guide to website hosting costs warns about. Email should survive any change of host or developer untouched.

The thirty-minute setup, step by step

First, the domain. If you already own one for your website, you will use that; if not, register one in your own account, in the business's name, for the reasons covered in our guide to who owns your domain name. The domain is the foundation the address is built on, so ownership matters more here than anywhere.

Second, the provider. Sign up to Workspace or 365, tell it your domain, and create your users. Resist the urge to make one shared account everyone logs into: individual addresses cost a few pounds and save you the day someone leaves with the password.

Third, the MX records. Your provider gives you a short list of DNS entries to add wherever your domain is managed, and this is the step that actually routes mail to your new inbox. Both providers walk you through it with copy-paste values, and both verify the setup for you. Add the free extras while you are there: aliases like info@ and accounts@ that deliver into your real mailboxes cost nothing, and the authentication records the provider suggests (SPF and DKIM, in the jargon) are what keep your invoices out of spam folders.

We practise all of this ourselves: every address at webdevwales.com runs on our own domain through exactly this setup, and if your domain's DNS feels like the intimidating part, get in touch and we will point you the right way in ten minutes, no obligation attached.

The mistakes that surface a year later

The failures we untangle for clients are rarely about the setup and nearly always about ownership and recovery. The commonest: email bought as a hosting bundle, so a decision to change host suddenly threatens the inbox, turning a £5-a-month tidy-up into a hostage negotiation. Close behind: the registration and recovery details for the whole email system pointing at one person's personal address, or at an address on the same domain, which locks everyone out on precisely the day something breaks.

Your email address outlives websites, hosts and computers. Set it up so it can survive all of them changing, because eventually they all will.

The fix costs nothing at setup time: recovery details on an independent address, two people in the business holding admin access, and the domain in the business's own registrar account. Written down, it is obvious; unwritten, it is next year's emergency.

Moving from an existing tangle

If your email already lives somewhere awkward, a hosting bundle, an old provider, one overloaded personal address, migration is a bounded, well-trodden job rather than a leap. Both Workspace and 365 import existing mail, the MX switch cuts new delivery over in hours, and the old address can forward during the transition so nothing is missed. The one rule: migrate before a dispute or a hosting move forces the issue, because doing it calmly takes an afternoon and doing it during a fallout takes a fortnight.

What it all costs, and what it returns

The complete professional setup for a two-person business: domain around £15 a year, email at roughly £120 a year, half an hour of setting up. Against that, every message you send does quiet credibility work, your deliverability sits on your own reputation rather than a free provider's, and your addresses survive every future change of website, host or staff. Alongside the domain and hosting guides, this completes the plumbing a small business's web presence stands on, and it is the cheapest of the three to get right.