Why Should You Keep Your Email and Website Hosting Separate?

Coaches, consultants, writers, authors, healers, hypnotists… basically anyone sharing content/services on their website… need to have a reliable email. This is an email that you pay for and not a free gmail or yahoo account.

I am a firm believer that having a professional email shows you take pride in your business and in what you are providing on your website.

In other words – you are serious about your business.

In many cases, when you purchase web hosting, your host may give you free email boxes as part of the package. It’s tempting to do this, but, if you do, you are putting yourself at risk.

It seems pretty amazing for many people because it makes it easy to set up their own email, the email they’ve always dreamed about.

However, hosting your website and email on the same server is not the best idea.

Having your email hosted by your website host comes along with several problems which may negatively impact your business.

We have put together 4 reasons why you should host your website and email separately.

1 – When your website goes down, so does your email

The unfortunate truth is that you might experience occasional downtime of your website, which sadly, is unavoidable. Usually this these instances are for a very brief period of time and you never know because it happens so fast and your site is back up again.

We have alerts set up in our business that let us know if a client’s website is experiencing problems. We can address it quickly. This situation is worse when your email is also hosted on your website host as they go down together.

This means that your email will be inaccessible for that period when your website is down. And there isn’t much that we can do quickly because email is an animal of its oawn.

For coaches, healers, consultants and the like, losing access to your email might translate to losing leads – and potentially a significant loss of income, too.

But when your email and website are hosted in different places, you can at least send and receive business emails.

Our recommendation is to have a Google Workspace email. This is a professional email that is hosted with Google and is super easy to get set up and use.

2 – Website hosting is not for email

Web hosting is primarily designed for hosting websites, not emails. If you are paying more for a cup of coffee than you are your website hosting, you could still run into issues with your website – but that is a different topic.

Hosting platforms are specifically tailored to host websites and the support that is provided for email hosting is only a secondary consideration.

Email plays a crucial role in the daily functioning of your small business so it’s crucial that you get maximum support whenever possible. When you host the two on separate servers, you will be guaranteed of superior support from both your email host and website host, as they both have specialized experience in their particular fields.

Again, Google is amazing and the support you need is minimal because it’s so easy to use.

Since most folks are using a shared web hosting plan where you share your server and IP address with sometimes hundreds of others, you risk your IP getting blocked and flagged as spam because another person on your server might have gotten hacked and is sending spam mail unwittingly.

That is tough to fix and is avoidable when you are with a reputable hosting company.

Hosting your website and email separately will give you the peace of mind that you are investing in valuable systems for your business.

Cheap shared hosting providers like Bluehost tend to pack as many users as they can into the same servers to reduce cost.

The issue with this is that if someone on your server is sending out spam, it will get the IP blacklisted and affect your deliverability and the reputation of your site as well as everyone else on the same server.

Chances are great there’ll be a least one person in your server sending out spam. It’s definitely not a risk I would be willing to take if it were my business.

Basically, your deliverability is extremely dependent on your neighbors and who wants to worry about that?

3 – You need the freedom to move your website

What if you ever want to move your WordPress website to another hosting company? You can do that pretty easily and most hosting companies worth going with will move your website for you. But, if your email is tied up with the hosting company you want to leave, well, this puts a whole different spin on the move.

If your emails are hosted by your web host, taking them with you can be very difficult and in most cases, very tricky and time-consuming. We’ve had to do this before with clients and it’s very time consuming and takes a certain level of expertise so no emails are lost in the transition.

In other words.. this takes more than a cup of coffee to get us through!

If your emails and website are hosted separately, you will be able to change your hosting company quite simply and your emails remain untouched. You will be much more secure if your email addresses are stored with a different server.

4 – Emails will take up space on your hosting server

When you purchase web hosting, your web host will give a certain amount of disk space for your website. This space might be enough for your website but if your emails are hosted on the same server, you could be at risk of depleting it.

All those business emails you keep on sending and receiving plus the attachments will all take up your disk space that needs to be used by your website. So to ensure that your website’s disk space doesn’t run low, you will want to host your email on a separate server. This will give you plenty of space to store your website content.

Conclusion

Your business email is an integral part of your business and should not be a bonus feature of your hosting company. You should invest in a professional email service that will give you peace of mind when it comes to functionality and support.

We specialize in WordPress hosting and we help our clients build, launch, and manage their websites. We’re laser-focused on things like WordPress best practices, how plugins and our Divi theme interacts, the development workflow…really everything that has to do with WordPress.