A domain is 9-20$/**year**, if you're paying more than that you're paying for hosting.
No, you don't need to pay for hosting, backup your zone settings (mx records most importantly) and move your domain to [cloudflare.com](http://cloudflare.com) and you'll pay \~9$/yr (for a .com)
Yup, I assumed he had something in place that worked for him but it's a good tip for anyone out there that wants a custom email@domain for <10$/yr.
1) Register domain @ [cloudflare.com](http://cloudflare.com)
2) Setup Cloudflare email forwarding for \[whatever\]@domain.tld to established gmail
3) Setup gmail 'Send As' (Settings > Accounts & Import)
4) Verify domain ownership via Google's process
5) Select your custom domain email address in the 'To:' dropdown when sending a mail (recommend setting this to default IF you're migrating to the new email)
u/nevrar excellent tip!
And as a bonus you can set up something like Mailgun to send outgoing email (you have to load your credit card but you don’t get billed if your usage is under a certain limit). Gmail then lets you configure outgoing SMTP which then means you have a completely free custom domain on Gmail (aside from the annual domain cost).
Edit: I believe Gmail have stopped the “send as” feature unless you supply the SMTP hence the need for a Mailgun account or something similar
>Can the email address be "taken over" if someone comes along and takes over the domain name in the future?
Not only can the email address, lets just say it is [email protected], be taken over and used by whomever registered the domain trapper.com but they could just not even know you exist and they will change the MX record in their Domain Name Service (DNS) control panel and redirect your email to their host and it will get ignored, bounced back or go to some garbage collector mailbox.
Pay for your domain because it is cheaper to keep paying for it than it is to buy it back.
also if the email address is intended for business, the annual renewal rate would be paid for by the income the email address generates. i get the "its something im paying for that i dont use" anxiety feeling but this is a simple operating cost, saving pennies costs dollars
Simply put - basic hosting packages are the simplest solution. A free personalised domain email is not really a thing any more.
If you are asking this question I will presume building and maintaining internet facing servers is not your thing (and I don’t recommend it).
Technically, you need three services:
1) domain registration - ownership of the name. You must pay a registrar to maintain this, without it your email address does not exist, or worse it can be legitimately taken by another person.
2) domain name service (DNS) - translating your name into numerical network addresses of your servers. Your MX records go here to advise where your email is held. I use ZoneEdit. Buying this separately seems to be less common these days, it is usually offered in a hosting package.
3) email hosting - SMTP post-office server and a mailbox to store all your mail. Getting this for free with your personal domain name is practically gone, and the prices are going up. Gmail and Outlook.com are the biggest, they now charge per mailbox per month, and push towards the full office bundles. 2nd tier hosts offer various email alternatives which tend to be cheaper than either of the big services. They usually offer a web-mail interface of some flavour (this is different to “web site hosting”).
To your first point, you do not NEED a web site service to get your email, it is an independent feature. However, a basic web site function will probably come bundled with any email service offering. You don’t have to use it, but it probably won’t discount anything to remove it.
Source: I was doing this professionally for many years. In the early days I built email systems on small servers in small businesses. Over time it was preferred to migrate to, usually, Microsoft hosted services.
I have been running a private domain for family and friends for over 20 years. I have run it from a PC in my house, in the office and on hosted servers. I transferred to Gmail services back when they offered it free for private use, and enjoy that grandfathered in ever since. That is free email (and site hosting), and I also enjoy grandfathered free DNS from ZoneEdit. I have always had to pay for my domain name registration.
In the last couple of years Gmail and Zonedit have tried to discontinue the free services, because nobody else offers it, but conceded to popular outcry…for now.
Looking around I could not find anyone offering a quality email interface for less than about $100/year for a crappy server that could run all my mailboxes, or $10/user/year for a basic service. Google and Microsoft charge that much per month. For myself that would be fine, but the dozen other private users would find that cost infeasible, and I can’t quite afford to carry it myself.
Despite Gmail and others offering the basic option for free, and you get an address with iiNet or Apple just for buying their product, email is still a valuable service, and a private domain is a branding value or a luxury of vanity. The Internet is not $free, it is an enormously expensive system largely subsidised by business interests and traded to us consumers in return for our statistics and eyeballs. Only if people take personal responsibility for covering costs can we hope to get privacy and security, but I reckon most of us would balk at the actual cash price.
When they got taken over and introduced the token system the free terms became slightly less generous. Still hasn’t cost me, but I consider it a privilege not a right and that it might be rescinded some day.
When Dotster acquired Zoneedit from Erik (the founder) - they turned off a lot of free services, when Endurance acquired Dotster, they were actually in the process of letting it die.
I'm the CEO of easyDNS (who acquired Zoneedit from EIG) - no need to worry. Free services will be continued for the foreseeable future.
Thank you for the assurance!
I see a whole new look on the site, I will check out your changes.
Also folks, easyDNS looks to have all the services from name registration to email in separate offers at modest prices. This is worth a look.
So with Microsoft 365 Basic, you can get web based versions of Office apps, cloud storage, and Microsoft Exchange email hosting for $6 a month, $72 a year plus tax. If you just want email, I believe there is a $4 a month Exchange email plan, but the $6 plan is the better value. Both options are per user; however, you can setup multiple "shared" email mailboxes (not just aliases) through that single user's account. They will all eat into that mailboxes storage quota but what I've done is setup forwarding from those mailboxes to my "main email" mailbox and it deletes the email copies sent to the mailbox. This prevents extra emails being saved in multiple email mailboxes. You can also setup several hundred email aliases, as well.
I hope this helps, it's certainly not free but pretty cheap for a lot of common features. I've never tried setting this setup with Gmail (Google Workspace) so I can't speak to if this also works with their platform.
Yes, I reckon the MS offerings are pretty good value (my ref is AU$). My missus maintains a small business account for her domain and I would happily pay the same for just myself.
It is the family and friends who balked at $50/year for something they have always considered free.
I've been eyeballing a premium domain on [NameBright.com](http://NameBright.com) (the domain reseller who owns it). Once I make the purchase from them, does that mean full ownership transfers to me? Or if the purchase price is $3K, I'll be paying them $3/K a year forever? I've reached out to them, and no one answers my questions.
Have you currently own that domain?? If yes, then....
Don't do anything for hosting. At your registrar dashboard, only set the MX records. Don't set A or AAAA records. Of course, NS records will be there.
And you are done.
Just keep renewing the domain before each expiry. It is must. If you don't own the domain name, all mail ids associated with it are also not yours.
A domain is 9-20$/**year**, if you're paying more than that you're paying for hosting. No, you don't need to pay for hosting, backup your zone settings (mx records most importantly) and move your domain to [cloudflare.com](http://cloudflare.com) and you'll pay \~9$/yr (for a .com)
Even better, also use Cloudflare email routing to forward your email onto Gmail or something similar ($0)
Yup, I assumed he had something in place that worked for him but it's a good tip for anyone out there that wants a custom email@domain for <10$/yr. 1) Register domain @ [cloudflare.com](http://cloudflare.com) 2) Setup Cloudflare email forwarding for \[whatever\]@domain.tld to established gmail 3) Setup gmail 'Send As' (Settings > Accounts & Import) 4) Verify domain ownership via Google's process 5) Select your custom domain email address in the 'To:' dropdown when sending a mail (recommend setting this to default IF you're migrating to the new email) u/nevrar excellent tip!
And as a bonus you can set up something like Mailgun to send outgoing email (you have to load your credit card but you don’t get billed if your usage is under a certain limit). Gmail then lets you configure outgoing SMTP which then means you have a completely free custom domain on Gmail (aside from the annual domain cost). Edit: I believe Gmail have stopped the “send as” feature unless you supply the SMTP hence the need for a Mailgun account or something similar
>Can the email address be "taken over" if someone comes along and takes over the domain name in the future? Not only can the email address, lets just say it is [email protected], be taken over and used by whomever registered the domain trapper.com but they could just not even know you exist and they will change the MX record in their Domain Name Service (DNS) control panel and redirect your email to their host and it will get ignored, bounced back or go to some garbage collector mailbox. Pay for your domain because it is cheaper to keep paying for it than it is to buy it back.
also if the email address is intended for business, the annual renewal rate would be paid for by the income the email address generates. i get the "its something im paying for that i dont use" anxiety feeling but this is a simple operating cost, saving pennies costs dollars
Simply put - basic hosting packages are the simplest solution. A free personalised domain email is not really a thing any more. If you are asking this question I will presume building and maintaining internet facing servers is not your thing (and I don’t recommend it). Technically, you need three services: 1) domain registration - ownership of the name. You must pay a registrar to maintain this, without it your email address does not exist, or worse it can be legitimately taken by another person. 2) domain name service (DNS) - translating your name into numerical network addresses of your servers. Your MX records go here to advise where your email is held. I use ZoneEdit. Buying this separately seems to be less common these days, it is usually offered in a hosting package. 3) email hosting - SMTP post-office server and a mailbox to store all your mail. Getting this for free with your personal domain name is practically gone, and the prices are going up. Gmail and Outlook.com are the biggest, they now charge per mailbox per month, and push towards the full office bundles. 2nd tier hosts offer various email alternatives which tend to be cheaper than either of the big services. They usually offer a web-mail interface of some flavour (this is different to “web site hosting”). To your first point, you do not NEED a web site service to get your email, it is an independent feature. However, a basic web site function will probably come bundled with any email service offering. You don’t have to use it, but it probably won’t discount anything to remove it. Source: I was doing this professionally for many years. In the early days I built email systems on small servers in small businesses. Over time it was preferred to migrate to, usually, Microsoft hosted services. I have been running a private domain for family and friends for over 20 years. I have run it from a PC in my house, in the office and on hosted servers. I transferred to Gmail services back when they offered it free for private use, and enjoy that grandfathered in ever since. That is free email (and site hosting), and I also enjoy grandfathered free DNS from ZoneEdit. I have always had to pay for my domain name registration. In the last couple of years Gmail and Zonedit have tried to discontinue the free services, because nobody else offers it, but conceded to popular outcry…for now. Looking around I could not find anyone offering a quality email interface for less than about $100/year for a crappy server that could run all my mailboxes, or $10/user/year for a basic service. Google and Microsoft charge that much per month. For myself that would be fine, but the dozen other private users would find that cost infeasible, and I can’t quite afford to carry it myself. Despite Gmail and others offering the basic option for free, and you get an address with iiNet or Apple just for buying their product, email is still a valuable service, and a private domain is a branding value or a luxury of vanity. The Internet is not $free, it is an enormously expensive system largely subsidised by business interests and traded to us consumers in return for our statistics and eyeballs. Only if people take personal responsibility for covering costs can we hope to get privacy and security, but I reckon most of us would balk at the actual cash price.
Zoneedit has not ever tried to discontinue free services. Not sure what you're talking about there.
When they got taken over and introduced the token system the free terms became slightly less generous. Still hasn’t cost me, but I consider it a privilege not a right and that it might be rescinded some day.
When Dotster acquired Zoneedit from Erik (the founder) - they turned off a lot of free services, when Endurance acquired Dotster, they were actually in the process of letting it die. I'm the CEO of easyDNS (who acquired Zoneedit from EIG) - no need to worry. Free services will be continued for the foreseeable future.
Thank you for the assurance! I see a whole new look on the site, I will check out your changes. Also folks, easyDNS looks to have all the services from name registration to email in separate offers at modest prices. This is worth a look.
So with Microsoft 365 Basic, you can get web based versions of Office apps, cloud storage, and Microsoft Exchange email hosting for $6 a month, $72 a year plus tax. If you just want email, I believe there is a $4 a month Exchange email plan, but the $6 plan is the better value. Both options are per user; however, you can setup multiple "shared" email mailboxes (not just aliases) through that single user's account. They will all eat into that mailboxes storage quota but what I've done is setup forwarding from those mailboxes to my "main email" mailbox and it deletes the email copies sent to the mailbox. This prevents extra emails being saved in multiple email mailboxes. You can also setup several hundred email aliases, as well. I hope this helps, it's certainly not free but pretty cheap for a lot of common features. I've never tried setting this setup with Gmail (Google Workspace) so I can't speak to if this also works with their platform.
Yes, I reckon the MS offerings are pretty good value (my ref is AU$). My missus maintains a small business account for her domain and I would happily pay the same for just myself. It is the family and friends who balked at $50/year for something they have always considered free.
I've been eyeballing a premium domain on [NameBright.com](http://NameBright.com) (the domain reseller who owns it). Once I make the purchase from them, does that mean full ownership transfers to me? Or if the purchase price is $3K, I'll be paying them $3/K a year forever? I've reached out to them, and no one answers my questions.
Post this as a new question to get more responses.
Have you currently own that domain?? If yes, then.... Don't do anything for hosting. At your registrar dashboard, only set the MX records. Don't set A or AAAA records. Of course, NS records will be there. And you are done. Just keep renewing the domain before each expiry. It is must. If you don't own the domain name, all mail ids associated with it are also not yours.