Domain, hosting and email: how it fits together

The domain name is your address on the internet and is separate from where your site runs. It should be registered in your own company's name, with your email address as the contact and automatic renewal switched on.

A domain expiring because the reminder went to an old address is one of the most painful failures there is: the site is gone, the email is gone, and re-registering does not always work.

Moving a domain to another party is a standard procedure with a transfer code. If someone makes that difficult, you know enough.

Hosting is where the site runs. What you mainly want to know: where the data lives, who can access it, how often backups are made, and how quickly someone is there when it goes wrong.

For most businesses solid hosting inside the EU is enough, with a valid certificate, backups that can genuinely be restored and an environment that copes with a spike. Cheap is fine, provided you know what you are not getting.

Important for later: do you have access to the control panel yourself, even when someone else does the day-to-day work? And can you download a full copy of the site without having to ask permission?

Mail from your own domain should be configured correctly with the three technical records that fight spam. If they are missing, your quotes land in recipients' junk folders without you noticing.

Also keep mail separate from your website. If the site moves, the mail must simply keep working — that is a matter of the right settings at the domain, not of using the same company.

Test it now and then: send a message to an address at a large provider and see whether it arrives in the normal folder. That is five minutes' work and prevents months of unexplained quiet days.