Free mailboxes bundled with hosting are the most expensive free thing in this industry. What separating costs, what it buys, and the UK-friendly options.
Almost every shared hosting plan includes mailboxes, and using them is one of the most common avoidable mistakes in small business IT. Not because the mail servers are bad — some are fine — but because it welds two unrelated services together and puts your business communications in the same basket as your website.
Four reasons to separate
1. Migration becomes a hostage situation. Moving host should be a DNS change and an afternoon. If your mailboxes live there too, it becomes a mail migration with the potential to lose years of correspondence, and businesses routinely stay on hosting they dislike purely because moving the email is frightening.
2. Deliverability. Shared hosting mail servers sit on IP ranges shared with hundreds of other customers, some of whom will be sending marketing email badly. When those IPs get blacklisted, your invoices go to spam and there is nothing you can do about it. Google and Microsoft manage their reputation as a full-time job; your £5/month host does not.
3. Feature gap. Shared-hosting webmail is generally Roundcube or Horde. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 give you proper mobile sync, shared calendars, search that works, and recovery when someone deletes something important.
4. Outages compound. If your host has a bad day, you lose the website and the ability to tell customers why.
What it costs
| Option | Per mailbox | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Google Workspace | ~£5–6/user/mo | Teams already living in Docs and Meet |
| Microsoft 365 Business | ~£5–9/user/mo | Anyone needing desktop Office and Teams |
| Fastmail | ~£4/user/mo | Independent, privacy-minded, excellent IMAP |
| Migadu | ~£15/year for the whole domain | Many addresses, low volume — brilliant value for a small business |
| Zoho Mail | ~£1/user/mo, limited free tier | Tight budgets |
| Proton Mail | ~£6/user/mo | Encryption and Swiss jurisdiction as a requirement |
| Purpose-built at your host | Often included | Personal sites and forwarding only |
For a two-person business, Migadu at around £15/year for unlimited addresses on one domain is remarkable value and rarely mentioned. For anything with staff, Google or Microsoft is the sane default — you are buying deliverability and recovery, not features.
The managed WordPress trap
Worth stating plainly because it catches people mid-migration: Kinsta, WP Engine, Flywheel and Rocket.net include no email at all. Not a mailbox, not forwarding. If your mail currently runs on shared hosting and you move to one of these, your email stops on cutover unless you have already moved it.
Sort the email out first, as a separate project, a fortnight before the website moves. Then the hosting migration is genuinely just DNS.
Do not run your own mail server
It is technically achievable and almost always a mistake. Modern deliverability requires SPF, DKIM, DMARC, correct reverse DNS, a clean IP with sending history, and someone to notice when Microsoft silently starts rejecting you. VPS providers block port 25 by default precisely because of the abuse history. Self-hosting mail is a hobby, not an IT strategy — and the failure mode is invisible, which is the worst kind.
The records you will need either way
Whoever hosts your mail, publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the domain. Google and Microsoft both enforce authentication for bulk senders now, and an unauthenticated domain lands in spam regardless of who runs the server. Your provider gives you the exact records; it is a ten-minute job in your DNS panel, and our DNS guide explains what each does.
One sentence: keep the domain at a registrar, the mail at a mail specialist, and the website at a web host. Three suppliers, three bills, and no single failure that takes out all of it.
Published 12 June 2026. Prices and ownership change — check the comparison table for current figures, and the provider's own site before buying. No affiliate links anywhere on this site.