Business Email
Part of the GoodHost Knowledge Centre.
An address on your own domain is about the cheapest credibility a company can buy, and one of the easier things to set up badly. The usual path runs through a free personal account, then something@yourdomain.com.au once the website exists, then a slow realisation twelve months later that a share of your invoices have been landing in customers’ junk folders the whole time.
Business email in Australia is not really one product. It is a domain, a set of DNS records, a provider storing the mailboxes and a client on every phone and laptop, and the failures nearly always happen in the joins between those four. A missing SPF record does not announce itself. Neither does a mailbox that quietly stopped syncing after somebody changed a password.
These guides run from a first setup through to deliverability. If you are creating your first address on your own domain, the setup walkthrough is the place to begin. If mail is already going astray, the SPF, DKIM and DMARC explainer covers the three records that decide whether receiving servers trust you, and the guide to moving mailboxes covers doing it without losing history.
What does a business email setup actually involve?
Four pieces. A domain you control, a provider that stores the mailboxes, DNS records pointing mail at that provider and proving you are allowed to send as that domain, and a mail client on each device. Get the first three right and the fourth takes minutes. Get the DNS wrong and everything looks broken.
Should your website and your email sit with the same provider?
They can, and keeping one bill is genuinely convenient. Splitting them is equally valid and often better if you already pay for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace for calendars and documents. Your domain’s DNS decides where each service points, so the two decisions are independent of each other.
What should you check before committing to an email platform?
Storage per mailbox, what happens to an address when a staff member leaves, whether you can export everything if you decide to move, support for aliases and shared inboxes, and how spam filtering is handled in both directions. Price per user matters less than it appears once you count mailboxes you truly need.
GoodHost email hosting has not launched yet. The email hosting page is currently a notify form, so you can leave your address there and hear about it when it opens rather than guessing at timing. If you need something running today, the cPanel plans on the web hosting page are the practical option, and the Knowledge Centre covers the domain and DNS work that sits underneath any email setup.