Moving Website Hosting? What Happens to Your Email

Moving website hosting usually starts as a decision about price or reliability. It's only partway through that someone remembers the same domain sends and receives every order confirmation, every booking reply and every customer email. A website and its email often live on completely different systems even though they share one address. Moving one doesn't automatically move the other. Treat them as a single job and an afternoon's work turns into a week of missing messages.

What actually happens to your email when you move hosting?

Nothing, just by moving your website. A domain points at both a website and a mailbox through separate DNS records, so switching where the site lives doesn't touch where mail is delivered unless you change that on purpose. The record that controls email is called an MX record, and it has to be moved deliberately, at a time you choose, whether or not the website is moving with it.

That separation is also what protects you. A website going down for an hour during a move is visible and gets noticed straight away. Email quietly failing to arrive isn't, which is why it's the part worth being careful with, especially if you're one of the many small businesses still taking orders or bookings by email rather than through a form.

Why does email need separate handling from the website itself?

Because a website's files and a mailbox's messages sit on different servers, often run by different companies, even when one invoice from your current provider covers both. A new host taking over your site doesn't inherit your existing mailboxes, and it won't create them for you automatically. Worth checking this guide on business email addresses first if you don't already have one. Every mailbox on the domain has to exist wherever it's actually going to live, whether that's the new host, Google Workspace, Zoho or somewhere else, before you point anything at it.

How long does the switch actually take?

Longer than it looks, and not instantly, whichever provider is on the receiving end. Google's own support documentation on changing MX records says it can take up to 48 hours for new MX records to propagate, and until they have, mail keeps arriving at the previous provider rather than the new one. The same guidance is reassuring about what that actually costs you: no message is lost during that window, though some may need resending if they bounce while the two systems are mid handover. Short delay, not a gap where messages vanish.

The order that keeps mail arriving throughout

Before touching anything, it's worth checking who can actually make these changes and how well that access is protected. The National Cyber Security Centre's guidance on managing public domain names recommends enabling two-step verification on the account that manages your domain and DNS, and considering a lock on the domain itself while it isn't actively being changed. Both are worth doing before you start, not after something has gone wrong mid-move.

• Create every mailbox on the new side first. Nothing should point at a mailbox that doesn't exist yet, or messages sent to it during the gap simply bounce.
• Move the website separately, if it's moving too. There's no rule that the two have to happen on the same day, and splitting them gives you one thing to check at a time rather than two.
• Change the MX record last, and outside your busiest hours. Evenings or a weekend, per Google's own advice above, keeps the window of possible delay somewhere quiet.
• Leave the old mailbox reachable for a few days afterwards. A slow-arriving message during propagation still needs somewhere to land.
• Tell anyone expecting a reply that week. A supplier waiting on an order, or a customer mid-conversation about a booking. A delay then reads as a delay, not as being ignored.

What if you're moving more than one mailbox?

One person's own address is a small job. A shop or a small team moving five mailboxes at once is a bigger one, because every single one of those addresses has to exist on the new side before the MX record changes, not just the owner's. Miss one and it's not the whole business that loses email, just whoever was using that particular address, which is often the harder problem to notice because nobody else sees it happening.

If the technical side isn't something you want to do yourself, most hosts and registrars will make the MX change on request rather than expect you to edit records directly. A short message covers it: "Please switch the MX records for ourbusiness.co.uk to the values for our new provider on Saturday evening, and confirm once it's done." A specific domain and a specific time leave almost no room for the request to be misread.

None of it is difficult on its own. It's just easy to do out of order, and doing it out of order is what turns a routine change into a week of missing enquiries. If you'd rather this sat inside someone else's checklist than yours, it's exactly the kind of housekeeping covered by our own care plan from £69 a month, alongside hosting and backups. Compare that against what you're already paying in our guide to website costs and choices, or, if the reason you're moving in the first place is the provider rather than the price, the fuller guide on switching website company covers the contract and domain side of the same move.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to warn my customers before I switch?

Not usually, if the move is timed for a quiet spell and the order below is followed properly. It's worth telling anyone you're expecting a time-sensitive reply from that week though, a supplier waiting on a purchase order, a customer mid-conversation about a booking, so a bounced message gets resent rather than assumed lost.

What happens to old emails already sitting in my inbox?

They don't move on their own. Forwarding only carries new messages that arrive after it's switched on, so anything already sitting in the old mailbox stays there unless you run an actual migration, which copies the existing messages across too. Ask the new host whether that's included before assuming your history comes with you.