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Web Design without hosting e-mail!

by UKKahuna
4 replies
Hi guys,

I've started an offline business simply selling cheap and cheerful static websites to local businesses here in the UK to businesses that currently have a really bad one. I'm knocking them out at £299.99 each and I also provide the website hosting at £10 a month to give me a bit of residual income.

It's working well but because by and large these are clients with an existing site (and existing e-mail addresses) I'm running into issues because I don't want to transfer their domain names and end up hosting and therefore supporting their e-mail.

Is there a clever way that I can dissociate the email from the web hosting or am I better off just binning the hosting altogether (along with the residual income). It's annoying because without this issue it's a great business model but I fear it will become unsustainable as the business grows.

Many thanks,
UKKahuna
#design #email #hosting #web
  • Profile picture of the author jbyte
    Why don't you setup a reseller account with a hosting company and all your clients can have their own cpanel and emails.
    Most resellers will provide support for you.

    I am not sure of another way to get around this.
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    • Profile picture of the author nathanjacobs
      You can just use their hosting, have them give you their FTP info.

      It stays where it currently is hosted, their email stays the same, no hassle.

      If you are selling tons of these, it might be smart to get a reseller account like the guy said above - and talk them into the switch to your hosting service. It'll be a smooth transition without downtime if you do it correctly.
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    • Profile picture of the author iAmNameLess
      Originally Posted by jbyte View Post

      Why don't you setup a reseller account with a hosting company and all your clients can have their own cpanel and emails.
      Most resellers will provide support for you.

      I am not sure of another way to get around this.
      The problem is, email issues are common and they call you even if it isn't a problem on your end. Here, half the businesses I work with don't even have a domain email address, they use gmail or something else.

      If they have their email setup through microsoft exchange, I don't bother trying to get them to move their email to us, I'd rather they not.

      So if someone already has a domain email, I approach it like this... I tell them they'd continue paying their current hosting bill but would also be paying us for hosting the website. If they would want to move their email to us, they'd have to change a bunch of settings on their computers and phones and I wouldn't recommend that unless they have a tech guy on staff.

      All you have to do, is change the A records for the domain to point to whatever IP address you want. The A Record would be set for www and then you would add a cname for the FTP with the www alias. It's actually pretty easy to do. If they do have a domain email already and not wanting to pay 2 hosting bills, you can set up their email through gmail and just change the mx records and everything you need so they can login and access email through gmail and still have their domain email.
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  • Profile picture of the author Vincentz Dalsgaard
    I CNAME most of my and my clients site to rackspace or amazon web hosting, costs almost nothing
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