Yes — you can have a proper business email address at your own domain without owning a website. You need three things: a domain name, an email hosting plan, and a couple of DNS records. You do not need web hosting, a website builder or a designer. Plenty of UK trades and consultants run on a Google Business Profile, WhatsApp and a Facebook page — and still want to be you@yourbusiness.co.uk rather than a Gmail address. Here is what you need, what you can skip, and what it costs as at September 2026.
A quote from daveplumbing1987@hotmail.com and the same quote from dave@daveplumbing.co.uk read differently to a customer choosing between three tradespeople. A free mailbox also belongs to the provider, not to you: take on an apprentice or sell the business, and a mailbox on your own domain transfers where a free one does not. The domain is the asset; the mailbox just sits on it.
The only non-negotiable — without one there is no @yourbusiness.co.uk to send from. A .co.uk or .uk domain is £8.95 a year with us and a .com is £12.95, and you can register one purely for email. Nothing obliges you to put a site on it.
This is the part people get wrong. Web hosting and email hosting are separate services that happen to be sold together, so buying web hosting for the mailboxes bundled with it means paying for a server you will never upload anything to.
What you want is email-only hosting: mailboxes, spam filtering, webmail and IMAP, so the same messages appear on your phone and laptop. Our email plans run as mail-only accounts on hardware we own in UK data centres, with no website attached at all.
Your domain needs an MX record telling the world where to deliver mail, plus SPF, DKIM and DMARC records proving the mail came from you. With domain and email at the same provider this is done for you at setup; otherwise it is a five-minute copy-and-paste job.
Everything else: web hosting, an SSL certificate for a site that does not exist, WordPress, a page-builder subscription, a designer, and the "free website" offers that mean a free first year and then a renewal. You can usually skip the bundled office suite too — buying Word, Excel and Teams to get email is an expensive way to get email.
All figures are monthly, taken from each provider's own UK pricing pages and correct as at September 2026. Where a provider advertises a discounted first term, the renewal price is shown, because that is what you pay from year two.
| Plan | Priced | Storage per mailbox | 1 mailbox | 5 mailboxes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IONOS Email (renewal price) | Per plan, 5 accounts included | 2 GB | £2.50 | £2.50 |
| Microsoft Exchange Online Plan 1 | Per user | 50 GB | £3.10 | £15.50 |
| UKBox Starter Email | Per business, 10 mailboxes included | 10 GB (100 GB pooled) | £4.99 | £4.99 |
| Microsoft 365 Business Basic | Per user | 100 GB + 50 GB archive | £5.40 | £27.00 |
| Google Workspace Business Starter | Per user | 30 GB pooled | £5.90 | £29.50 |
| GoDaddy M365 Email Essentials (renewal price) | Per mailbox | 10 GB | £10.49 | £52.45 |
Microsoft, Google and IONOS publish ex-VAT prices; GoDaddy's UK email page does not state VAT treatment either way, so we have not assumed one.
If you need one mailbox and nothing else, we are not the cheapest option on that table and it would be daft to pretend otherwise. IONOS renews at £2.50 a month for five accounts — the lowest published price in the UK market — and bundles a free domain and 24/7 support, which we do not match. Microsoft's Exchange Online Plan 1 is £3.10 per user with a 50 GB mailbox, five times the per-mailbox storage on our Starter plan.
What you trade for that is worth knowing: IONOS gives you 2 GB a mailbox, which sounds fine until three years of quotes with photographs attached are sitting in your sent items. It is also a renewal price following a £1 introductory year.
The per-user plans bite later rather than now. At one mailbox Exchange Plan 1 is cheaper than us; at five it is £15.50 against our £4.99, because we charge per business and they charge per person. That gap is the whole argument for flat pricing, and it only appears once you grow.
Buy yourbusiness.co.uk for email, put nothing on it, and somebody will eventually type it into a browser and get an error page — a bad look for a domain printed on a van. Two cheap fixes, neither a website project: redirect the domain to your Facebook page or Google Business Profile, or put up a single holding page with your phone number and service area.
Email that lands in spam is worse than no email at all: you think you have replied and the customer thinks you ignored them. What decides it is authentication — SPF, DKIM and DMARC records that let Gmail and Outlook verify your mail is really yours. We configure all three from day one, DMARC starting in monitoring mode and tightened to reject on request. No provider can honestly promise the inbox every time, which is why every account also gets per-message delivery tracing. Our email deliverability page carries the detail, including our sending hostname and IP range so you can test before moving.
Register the domain or point an existing one at us, choose a plan, and say how many mailboxes you want. We create them, set the DNS and authentication records, and migrate any old mail across free with nothing left behind. Then add the account to Outlook, Apple Mail or your phone over IMAP. It is an afternoon, most of it waiting for DNS to propagate.
We are not going to claim websites are optional in every case. If customers research before they buy, if you want to rank in Google for anything beyond your own name, if you sell online, or if you need to publish prices or accreditations, you need a site — a Facebook page is rented ground. Email simply comes first, and since our email plans are separate from our hosting, adding a site later changes nothing about your mailboxes.
Yes. You need a domain name and an email hosting plan; web hosting is a separate product you can skip. Our email plans run as mail-only accounts with no website attached.
No. You can keep a domain wherever it is registered and point its MX records at a different email host. Keeping both in one place is simpler because the records get set for you, but it is not required — and you can transfer a domain away from us whenever you like.
Usually more than one: most sole traders want a personal address plus accounts@ or info@ for invoices and enquiries. On plans that charge per person that is two subscriptions; on ours it is one price. Starter Email includes 10 mailboxes at £4.99 a month plus VAT, with unlimited aliases and forwarders on top, so extra addresses landing in an existing mailbox cost nothing.
Ours are held for three years in writing, with no setup fee and no contract. Several plans in the table above advertise an introductory price then roughly double or triple it, so it is worth modelling the three-year total before you commit — our cost calculator will do it for you.
Three, stated plainly. We do not offer mailing lists or email archiving, so if you need either, buy elsewhere. Backups are daily, kept for a rolling five days and copied off-site to a second UK data centre. Our 99.9% uptime figure is a target we publish a live status page against, not a service-credit-backed SLA. And support is UK human support 365 days a year, typically replying in about ten minutes between 8am and 5pm — staff are usually about from 5am to midnight, but it is not a guaranteed 24/7 call centre.
If you have put off the professional address because you assumed it meant commissioning a website first, it does not. A domain and a mailbox is the whole job.
See our UK business email plans — from £4.99 a month plus VAT for 10 mailboxes, flat per business rather than per person, with free migration and the price held three years.
— The UKBox team
