Business email at your own domain
A real mailbox, at your own address, from £50 a year including VAT. Moved across by a person from wherever it is now, provided your current mail can be copied out, and almost all of it can.
Why this exists
Most small businesses end up with email in one of two states. Either it's a personal address doing business work, which costs nothing and looks it, or it's on a platform that was cheap when they signed up and has since been repriced by somebody who has never heard of them.
What I sell is the middle: a proper mailbox at your own domain, set up by a person, moved across by that same person, and looked after by somebody you can ring.
What it costs
| Email at your own domain | Price |
|---|---|
| First mailbox | £50 a year |
| Each additional mailbox | £30 a year |
| Moving your existing mail across | £90, minimum |
| Bigger mailbox, 50 GB, with a calendar and contacts book | £60 a year extra, per mailbox |
All including VAT at 20%. Billed once a year.
What you get
- A real mailbox at your own domain, so you send and reply from your business address rather than a personal one
- 10 GB per mailbox as standard, or 50 GB on the upgrade
- Webmail, and your mail on your phone and your laptop, set up properly rather than left to you
- Aliases and forwarding, so
info@andaccounts@land where you want them - SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured, which is what decides whether your mail reaches people at all
What other people charge
Worth putting side by side, with one important caveat underneath it.
| One mailbox, per year | Inc VAT |
|---|---|
| Here | £50 |
| Microsoft 365 Business Basic | about £78 |
| Google Workspace Business Starter | about £85 |
The caveat matters more than the numbers. Every price above except mine is self-service. You set it up, you move your own mail across, and when something stops working you write to a support queue and wait. What you are comparing is not the same product with a different price on it.
So read that table as the floor rather than the answer.
Two things to ask me about before you buy the upgrade
The calendar and contacts book sync to your phone and your laptop. Setting that up on an Android phone works differently from an iPhone, so tell me what you use and I'll check it does what you need before you pay for it.
And if you need more than one person working from the same calendar, ask before you buy rather than after. That is a different thing from syncing your own calendar between your own devices, and I want to check what is actually supported for your case rather than assume it.
Who this is for
- Your current provider has put the price up and you have started looking around
- You run a business from a Gmail or Hotmail address and would rather it came from your own domain
- You already have a domain I look after and it may as well carry your email too
- You want one supplier and one invoice rather than three portals
Who it isn't for, and I'll be blunt
- Anyone who wants Teams, the Office apps and a terabyte of OneDrive
Microsoft carries all of that on top of the mailbox for a few pounds more, and on features nothing here beats it. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
What this is instead: mail that works, set up and looked after by a person you can ring, on one invoice with the rest of what you have from me. If that's worth something to you, it's a fair deal. If it isn't, buy Microsoft and I'll tell you how to set it up.
Moving your mail
Migration is the part people dread and it is the part I actually do. Your messages, folders and structure come across, and I keep the old mailbox reachable while the change settles rather than cutting it off and hoping.
The fee is £90 as a minimum, or £30 a mailbox above three. What it buys is somebody watching the transfer rather than a self-service tool and a support article.
The one condition: your current mail has to speak IMAP
That is how a migration copies messages from one place to another, and almost every provider supports it. It's worth checking rather than assuming, because a few setups don't: some older accounts are collected by POP, which pulls mail down and deletes it from the server, so there may be very little left to move. Others have IMAP switched off by an administrator.
Send me the provider name and I'll tell you before you commit to anything. If your mail can't be migrated cleanly I'd rather say so at the start than discover it halfway through, and there are usually other ways to get your history across.
And one honest note about very full mailboxes. A mailbox holding more than 10 GB needs the bigger size to land at all. If yours is in that state I'll tell you before we start, and we'll decide together whether to archive the old years or carry them across, because that choice changes what it costs from the second year onwards.
What it runs on
- IMAP
- SMTP
- SPF
- DKIM
- DMARC
Standard mail protocols on a commercial mail platform, which means your mail works in Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, the app on your phone or a browser, whichever you prefer. Nothing here is proprietary and nothing locks you in.
I'm not going to pretend I run a datacentre. What you're buying from me is that it's configured properly, that the DNS is right, that the migration is done by a person, and that there's somebody who knows your setup when you need them.
Ask me what it would cost for your setup.
Tell me how many mailboxes, roughly how big they are, and who your current provider is. That's enough for a straight answer, including whether it can be migrated at all, and sometimes the straight answer is that you should stay where you are.