domain and email hosting - anyone clued up on this?

[rudebhoy]

I've got a small holiday cottage which I let out. When I started doing it a couple of years ago, I bought a domain name and website hosting from Siteground.

It's turned out that the website is a bit of a waste of time. 90% of our first-time business comes from booking platforms (Airbnb and HomeAway), and the rest from Facebook.

We get a fair amount of return bookings direct - we leave business cards in the cottage and encourage folk to contact us direct using the domain email address.

I've decided to ditch the web hosting when it's due for renewal next month, but would like to retain the domain name and the email account associated with it. (The web hosting is £130 a year, the domain only costs £15 a year).

I've spoken to Siteground and they would still charge us £130 a year to host the emails even if we delete the website.

Is there a better solution for retaining the domain name and associated email hosting, or am I best just to get rid of the lot and use a free gmail account?

 

[Pathetic Shark]

You can transfer the domain to any web hosting company you use. I did it a few years ago when I took my admittedly-massive NFL website from Yahoo to GoDaddy. It does take a few e-mails and forms but not that difficult. Then you upload the site information to the new hoster.

Don't let the potential aggravation of changing hosts put you off. The existing hosts do try to make seem a little difficult to move as they don't want you to leave and want your money. Insert Europe/Brexit gag here.

 

[rudebhoy]

You can transfer the domain to any web hosting company you use. I did it a few years ago when I took my admittedly-massive NFL website from Yahoo to GoDaddy. It does take a few e-mails and forms but not that difficult. Then you upload the site information to the new hoster.

Don't let the potential aggravation of changing hosts put you off. The existing hosts do try to make seem a little difficult to move as they don't want you to leave and want your money. Insert Europe/Brexit gag here.

cheers, don't mind changing hosts if I can get email only hosting for buttons. Plenty folk not bothering with websites these day and just using Facebook to advertise, but with a domain name email address.

 

[jp5]

I would suggest using Google for your domain-name email address (£40/year) would save you money over your current host, and you won't find better than Google's infrastructure.
https://gsuite.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/products/gmail/

It is possible to set it up yourself (depending on how technically minded you are) or find someone to do it for you - not a big job.

 

[rudebhoy]

I would suggest using Google for your domain-name email address (£40/year) would save you money over your current host, and you won't find better than Google's infrastructure.
https://gsuite.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/products/gmail/

It is possible to set it up yourself (depending on how technically minded you are) or find someone to do it for you - not a big job.

thanks. been looking at fasthosts who will host email for £2.39 a month, they also do free email forwarding as an alternative, so we set up a gmail account which hosts the mails, but use domain name email and it will automatically forward mails to / from gmail.

agree google infrastructure a plus though. does this include domain registration / transfer?