Business email has one metric, and it is whether the message lands

Estimates arriving from free webmail addresses are measurably discounted by the people receiving them, which makes a domain-based address the cheapest credibility a small firm ever buys. That much is well established.

What is less well known is that moving to your own domain can make delivery worse if the DNS is left half-configured. A domain with no SPF record and no DKIM signature is exactly the profile a spam filter treats with suspicion, so the move has to be done properly to pay off.

Send a message from the new mailbox to an address on a large consumer provider and open the raw headers. You are looking for three lines: spf=pass, dkim=pass and dmarc=pass. Anything else is a configuration job, not bad luck.

Then test the direction that matters commercially. Submit your own website's contact form from an outside address and check where it lands, because form mail is generated by the server rather than by your mail client and often fails independently of everything else.

Outbound mail here goes through MailChannels, which is what keeps a shared platform's sending reputation acceptable to the large mailbox providers. That is infrastructure you would otherwise have to buy separately.

An IMAP transfer copies every folder and every message into the new mailboxes intact, and we run it alongside you. Your current address keeps working the entire time, because the MX records are only changed once the copy has been verified.

Check the company before you hand over the mail: HostingFast is a trading name of Vitalcare at Home Ltd, registered in England and Wales, with terms under English law. Email is the account that recovers all your other accounts, so it is worth the search.