Hosting, the domain and business email are the three services a company notices only when they fail. They are also the three most likely to be bought on price alone, from whoever appeared first in a search, and then forgotten until the morning nothing works.
Here is how to rate all three properly, whoever you end up buying from.
The domain: whose name is it in
This is the single most important question in this article. Open the registration record for your domain and check the registrant name. It should be your company. Not your developer, not an agency, not a member of staff who has left.
A domain registered to somebody else is not yours. It is lent to you, and the loan can end. Everything else in this article is recoverable in an afternoon. A lost domain takes the website, every email address and years of search ranking with it.
- Is the registrant your company name
- Do you have the login to the registrar yourself
- Is auto renewal on, and does the renewal notice reach somebody who still works there
- Is the domain locked against transfer
Hosting: rate the answer, not the specification
Hosting specifications are almost meaningless to compare. Every provider claims high uptime and nobody publishes the failures. Rate the things you can actually verify:
- Backups. Not whether they exist, but whether anybody has ever restored one. An untested backup is a hope, and an empty archive file looks exactly like a full one until the day you need it.
- Certificates. Does https work everywhere, and does it renew automatically? A certificate that quietly expires shows every visitor a full page browser warning.
- Who answers. Send the support address a question before you buy. The reply time you get as a prospect is the best case you will ever see.
- Moving out. Ask how you would leave. A provider confident in its service will answer that plainly.
Business email: the part everybody underrates
Email on your own domain is not vanity. It is the difference between an invoice that gets paid and one that goes to a spam folder, and it is the most common failure in small business technology.
The things that actually decide whether your mail arrives:
- The DNS records. Three settings decide whether the receiving side trusts you. Get them wrong and your mail lands in spam no matter how good the server is.
- Reputation of the server you share. If the machine sending your mail is also sending somebody's marketing blast, you inherit the consequences.
- Sending limits. Sensible limits protect everyone on the server. No limits at all means one compromised account can get the whole machine blocked.
- Storage and what happens when it fills. A mailbox at its limit silently stops receiving, which is a bad way to find out.
- Backups of the mail itself. Hosting backups often do not include mailboxes.
Test it before you commit. Send a message from a candidate mailbox to a personal account elsewhere and see where it lands, and how quickly.
The questions that expose a provider quickly
- When did you last restore a customer backup, and how long did it take?
- What happens to my mail if I do not pay on time?
- Can I get a full copy of my site and mail whenever I want?
- Who has access to my server, and is that logged?
- What is the process if my domain is about to expire and nobody notices?
Vague answers to those are the finding. The specifics matter less than whether somebody has thought about them at all.
How we run it
We host on our own infrastructure and register domains directly, so the same people answer for the site, the name and the mail. Domains go in the customer's name. Certificates renew automatically and we check daily that the site really is being served on one a browser accepts, rather than trusting that the setup step said it worked.
Mailbox backups run nightly on the mail server itself, and a separate daily check opens the newest archive and counts the messages inside, because a backup that exists and a backup that restores are not the same thing. Every hosting account includes business mailboxes on your own domain as standard.
The detail is on the hosting page and the Devcity Mail page. If you are moving from another provider and want to know what is involved, ask us and we will tell you plainly, including when staying where you are is the better answer.