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DNS hosting and email authentication, looked after with your site
As well as pointing at your website, your domain carries your email, proves to Gmail and Outlook that mail from you is genuine, and often has spare versions you bought to protect the name. When I host your site, I can look after all of that in the same place.
Your domain stays registered where it is. Only the DNS moves to me.
DNS hosting you can edit yourself
I host your domain’s DNS on Google Cloud DNS, with DNSSEC switched on so that answers about your domain can’t be forged. Once it’s with me, you manage the records from the DNS page in your dashboard. A new or changed record goes live within seconds.
- Presets add the full set of records for Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 in one step.
- Every change is saved as a version, showing who made it and when, and you can restore any earlier version.
- You can import a zone file from your old provider or export yours at any time.
- The records your website and email depend on are locked and shown as locked, so you can’t delete them by mistake.
Every hour the platform checks each editable domain against what it should contain and alerts me if anything has drifted.
Email that passes the checks
Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo now expect mail to carry three DNS records, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, that say who may send for your domain. Without them, your invoices and replies are more likely to land in spam.
For every domain whose DNS I host, I publish all three. The mail providers then send back daily reports about every message that claimed to come from your domain. The platform collects those reports every hour, and the Email Auth page in your dashboard shows the last seven days: how much mail went out in your name, which services sent it, and whether it passed.
The aim is to move your DMARC policy from monitoring, to quarantine, to reject, which stops other people sending mail as you. The platform reviews each domain daily and only proposes a step after at least 30 days of clean reports, or 45 for domains that send little mail. Spare domains that never send mail go straight to reject. Domains that send mail are in the monitoring stage now, and I tell you before your policy is tightened.
If you ask, I also check your mailboxes every hour by sending a test message and confirming it arrives.
Mail from your website
Your site’s own mail is included: contact forms, order confirmations, password resets and WordPress notices. Each site has an address for WordPress’s admin notices, which you can read in the dashboard and copy to whoever should see them.
If you send newsletters or a lot of mail, connect your own sending provider. I set up the connection and the DNS records for it.
Send as your own domain, on request
If you want to send from your own address through Gmail or a mail program, I can set up a mail relay for it. The relay signs your mail with its own DKIM key and uses its own bounce address, so it passes DMARC. It suits person-to-person mail, and I set it up by hand, so ask and I’ll tell you whether it fits.
Spare domains, redirected or parked
The .co.uk next to your .com, an old business name, a misspelling you bought to protect the brand: I can point each one at your live site or show a tidy holding page, both over HTTPS. The load balancer answers these itself with no server behind them, so they cost you nothing.
Short links and QR codes
From the dashboard you can make short links on a shared short domain, choose how they’re tagged for analytics, and download a QR code as SVG or PNG. Each link shows its clicks over the last 7 and 30 days, counted without cookies and without storing anyone’s IP address. A short domain of your own is included with the plan for standard domain endings, and I set it up for your links. For premium or unusual endings, ask me first: a domain that costs more than about £20 a year to register isn’t included as standard.
Hosted mailboxes
I host mailboxes on your own domain on the same UK platform as your site: webmail, calendars and contacts, working with phones and desktop mail programs. Your DNS, your email authentication and your mailboxes then sit in one place, with one person responsible for all of it.
Get in touch
Tell me what your site does and where it’s hosted now. I’ll reply within 24 hours with what moving it would involve and what it would cost. If you’d rather talk, call 020 3422 9767.
Christian Ashby
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