Domains and email cost less per year than a family dinner out, and they cause more business disruptions than any hosting bill I have seen. The technology is trivial; the ownership mistakes are not. Here is what to pay and, more importantly, who should hold the keys.
The real prices
| Item | Fair yearly cost |
|---|---|
| .com domain | $10 to $20 |
| Other TLDs (.net, .shop, country codes) | $10 to $50 |
| Business email (Google Workspace / Microsoft 365) | $72 to $100 per user |
| Email hosting on your own domain (basic) | $12 to $60 |
| SSL certificate | $0 (should always be free now) |
If someone quotes you more than this, ask what the extra buys. Occasionally the answer is real (premium DNS, security filtering). Usually it is margin.
The ownership rules that prevent disasters
1. The domain is registered to your business, in your account, with your email. Not your developer's account. Not your nephew's. Not the agency that built the site in 2019. I have watched businesses spend weeks and lawyers to retrieve domains from ex-partners. Prevention costs nothing: register it yourself, or have your developer register it in your name with your email on the account, then hand you the login.
2. DNS control stays with you. DNS is the switchboard connecting your name to your site and mail. You can delegate management to a developer (fine, normal), but the account that owns it must be yours. When you can change DNS, no provider can hold your identity hostage.
3. Email on your own domain, hosted by specialists. name@yourbusiness.com on Google or Microsoft. Not email bundled with your hosting plan: bundled email is where deliverability, backups, and migrations go to die, and moving off it later is miserable.
The expensive mistakes I keep cleaning up
The departed-developer domain. Site and domain registered in the developer's name, developer has vanished. Everything rebuildable except the name your customers know.
The expired domain. Auto-renew failed on an old card, domain lapsed, and a scraper bought it within a day. Buyback quotes start around $500 and go up. Two minutes of billing hygiene prevents this entirely: real card on file, auto-renew on, expiry reminders going to a monitored inbox.
The @gmail.com business. Customers subconsciously discount it, spam filters discount it, and you cannot leave because every invoice, contact, and account is tied to it. The fix costs $6/month and one afternoon of updating accounts.
The domain-and-hosting bundle. Registrar, hosting, email, and site builder all in one contract with one provider. Convenient until you want to change one thing and the answer is "that requires changing everything," with a rebuild attached.
A 10-minute health check you can do today
- Look up who your domain registrar is and whose account holds it
- Confirm auto-renew is on with a valid card
- Confirm the contact email on the domain is one you actually read
- Confirm you have a login to your DNS, even if you never touch it
- Check your email is on your own domain, not a free provider
Any "no" on that list is a small fire waiting for a windy day. Fixing all five costs less than $100 and an hour.
If you are not sure about your setup and do not want to poke around DNS yourself, tell me your domain. I will check the public side: registrar, mail records, and whether your setup has the common failure points, and tell you what to fix first.