Domain, hosting and email: what they are and what you need

Domain: your address

The domain is the name someone types to find your site. For a business aimed at Greece the natural choice is .gr, and if the same name is free as a .com it is worth keeping that too, so nobody else takes it.

.gr and .ελ names are governed by the rules of EETT, the Greek telecoms regulator, and are registered through registrars, the companies allowed to make registrations. You pay for a domain for a set period and have to renew it before it expires.

• You are the holder. The domain's details must show your business, not your web developer or an employee.
• Automatic renewal. A domain that expires takes the site and the email down with it.
• Access to the account. Keep the registrar login, or at least know who has it.
• With www and without. Check that both open and that one leads to the other. Anyone who types www and gets an error page will not try a second time.

Hosting: where the site lives

Hosting is the server that holds the site's files and sends them to visitors. The kind you need depends on how the site is built:

Good hosting shows in speed. If your site is slow before it even starts loading, the server is often to blame. More in Core Web Vitals in plain words.

Business email

An email address on your own domain looks like a serious business and stays yours even if you change providers. The two most common options are Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. As an example, Google Workspace Business Starter costs €6.80 per user per month on an annual commitment, excluding VAT, according to Google's official pricing page for Greece (October 2026).

Many hosting plans include email at no extra charge. For one or two mailboxes that may be enough, but it usually comes with less space, a weaker spam filter, and it ties your email to your hosting: change one and you change the other.

Work out what email on Google Workspace costs for your team:

DNS in plain words

DNS is your domain's phone book: it tells the world where the site is and where to deliver email. The records you will come across:

• A and CNAME: point to the site. For example, yourname.gr to an IP address and www to a name given by your hosting provider.
• MX: says where your email is delivered, for example to Google or Microsoft.
• TXT for SPF, DKIM and DMARC: prove that your emails really come from you and are not forged.
• Verification TXT: small records that Google, Meta and others ask for to confirm the domain is yours.

Since 1 February 2024 Google has required everyone sending to Gmail accounts to have at least SPF or DKIM, and anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to have SPF, DKIM and DMARC, according to Google's email sender guidelines. Without these records your emails, even your quotes, can end up in spam.

What has to be in your name

1. The domain, with your business as the holder.
2. The hosting or platform account, or at least admin access to it.
3. The email account (Google Workspace or Microsoft 365).
4. The Google Search Console, Google Analytics and Google Business Profile accounts.
5. A copy of the site, or the certainty that backups are being kept.

If you want someone to keep all of this in order for you, see website maintenance.