Business email, website hosting, and Microsoft 365 are three different things

A new business usually asks for “email and a website” as if they were one product. They can be bought from the same company. They are still three different things, and the mail stops working when those three are pointed at each other carelessly.

The domain is only the name

The domain is the name on the right of the @ and on the website address. Owning the name does not give you a mailbox and it does not put pages on the internet. It is the record that says where those services should be found. Keep the login for the registrar somewhere the company can still reach if the person who registered it leaves. A domain that cannot be renewed is a bigger outage than a slow website.

Hosting is where the public site lives

Website hosting is the place the pages are stored and served. It can include a small mailbox, and that mailbox is often fine for a one-person address that only receives enquiries. It becomes awkward when five people need calendars, shared files, and a mailbox that still works while the website is being moved. Moving a site and moving mail are different jobs. Do them on purpose, not because a hosting invoice changed.

Microsoft 365 is mail, files, and identity

Microsoft 365, for a small office, is usually the mailboxes on your domain plus Word, Excel, and a place for shared documents, with a login per person. Google Workspace is the other common path and it solves the same shape of problem. Neither one is “a website”. You can run the site on ordinary hosting and the mail on Microsoft 365. That is normal. The website’s DNS must then be told, carefully, where mail should go. If that record is overwritten during a site migration, mail does not bounce politely. It disappears.

What to decide first

• The domain name, and who can renew it.
• Whether the website is a simple set of pages or something staff log into.
• How many people need a mailbox, and whether they need shared files as well as mail.
• Who may create and close those accounts.

Licences should be genuine. A shared login passed around on paper is cheaper for a week and expensive the week that person leaves. FuchaTech sets up domains, hosting, and business mail, including Microsoft 365 where that is the right fit, and supplies licences without inventing a price in a blog post. Say how many people need an address and whether a site already exists.