The domain is your website’s address (for example yourbusiness.it), hosting is the space on the internet where the website lives and stays reachable, and a business email is a mailbox that uses your domain (name@yourbusiness.it). The domain must be registered in your name, not the agency’s or whoever set it up for you: it’s your business’s name online, and whoever controls it decides where your website and your email point.
Three different things, in plain words.
- The domain is the address: yourbusiness.it. Think of it as your sign and street number, what people type in or hear you spell out on the phone.
- Hosting is the space on the internet where the website’s files live, always on and reachable. Think of it as the premises your shop is in.
- A business email is a mailbox that uses your domain: name@yourbusiness.it. Think of it as the letterbox with your name on it.
They’re separate services: the domain says where your website and your email are, and each of them can sit with a different provider.
The domain: how to choose it.
- Short and easy to spell out, ideally your business’s name.
- No hyphens or numbers, when you can avoid them: on the phone they cause confusion.
- .it or .com? For a business that works in Italy, .it is usually the most natural and recognisable choice. If many of your guests or customers come from abroad, you can also register the .com and point it to the same website.
For .it domains the official registry is Registro .it, run by the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of Italy’s National Research Council (CNR) in Pisa; domains are registered through providers called registrars.
Why it must be in your name.
Every domain has a registrant: the person or company that holds the right to use it. If your business’s domain is registered to the agency, a former collaborator or the friend who built your website, you depend on them to change provider or move your email. A domain also has to be renewed regularly: if it expires and nobody renews it, after a grace period it can become available again and be registered by someone else, along with all the email that used to arrive there.
What to check today.
- Whose name the domain is in. Ask whoever registered it and have them show you the registrant details.
- Where it’s registered and who has access to the registrar account.
- When it expires and who renews it.
- Where your email runs and who can create or close mailboxes.
- Who manages the hosting and whether backups of the website exist.
Write it all down in one document and keep it with your business papers: you’ll need it every time you change provider.
Business email: why it’s worth it.
An address like name@yourbusiness.it is more recognisable than a generic free mailbox, and it repeats your name with every message. It’s also tied to your domain, so you can switch email service without changing address. Website and email are independent, because your domain settings (the DNS) have separate entries for each: whoever rebuilds your website should only touch the website entries, so your email keeps arriving.
With Aleryc, what stays yours.
With websites built by Aleryc, hosting is included in the monthly fee and the domain is added separately in the quote, priced in tiers by type: we register the domain in your name, renew it ourselves for as long as the service is active and take care of hosting, updates and security, keeping every version of the website. If you already have a domain, we connect the new website to it. We provide business email on request, based on a quote; if you already have a mailbox tied to your domain, when we connect the website we only touch the website settings and your email keeps arriving as always. And if you ever stop, the domain is registered in your name and stays yours: we keep it in our account to manage it, and we always give you the code to transfer it whenever you ask; the social media profiles are yours; the website and its code remain Aleryc’s, while the photos and materials you gave us stay yours and you receive the texts and logo created for you, and we never leave you without guidance. Write to us (in English, by email or WhatsApp) if you have questions.