Domains, Hosting and Email

Own your domain, your website and your email, and understand them well enough that your site stays up, nothing expires by surprise and your emails stop landing in spam.

Who this course is for

This course is for small business owners, freelancers and new web designers who have a website and an email address on their own domain, but are not quite sure how it all fits together. Perhaps a relative or an old designer registered the domain years ago and you do not know which account it sits in. Perhaps you are not sure when it renews, or why your emails keep going to customers' spam folders. Since 2024 Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have been tightening the rules for email senders, so a domain that has not been set up properly is now a real business risk. This course takes you through domains, DNS, hosting, SSL and business email in plain English, one short lesson at a time, so you can take control of your own setup or look after a client's with confidence.

What you should know first

No technical knowledge is needed. This is a beginner course in the Essentials path and every term is explained the first time it appears. You should be comfortable using a web browser, logging in to online accounts and copying and pasting text. For the WordPress lessons in modules 3 and 4 it helps if you can log in to a WordPress dashboard, but we show every click. To follow along on your own site you will need your own domain (or one you look after for someone else) and, ideally, the login details for wherever it is registered and hosted. If you do not have those logins yet, that is fine: lesson 1.1 shows you how to find out who controls each part.

By the end of the course you will be able to

• Explain how domains, DNS, hosting and email fit together, and work out who controls each part of a setup.
• Register, renew and transfer a domain safely, with privacy, transfer locks, two-factor sign-in and renewals under your own control.
• Read and edit DNS records (A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT and NS) and predict what each change will do before you save it.
• Choose hosting that suits a small WordPress site, make sure a valid SSL certificate is installed and force every page to load over HTTPS.
• Move a WordPress site to a new host with a checklist, a rollback plan and minimal downtime, without broken links or lost email.
• Set up business email with SPF, DKIM and DMARC passing, so your messages meet the Google, Yahoo and Microsoft sender rules.
• Make WordPress send its contact form and notification emails properly, so they arrive instead of vanishing.
• Put tested off-server backups and a renewals register in place so nothing expires or disappears unnoticed.

Your course project

Throughout the course you will sort out the setup for Brambles Dog Grooming, a one-woman dog grooming salon run by Jo Pickering at 14 Station Parade, Knaresborough HG5 9AB. Jo's domain, bramblesgrooming.co.uk, was registered in 2017 by her nephew Ryan using his own Hotmail address, and it expires on 3 November 2026. Her WordPress site was built by a local designer in 2020 on cheap shared hosting. The same host also runs her DNS and her mailbox, jo@bramblesgrooming.co.uk, which often lands in customers' spam folders. It is a very typical small business setup, and it is one problem away from being urgent.

Lesson by lesson you will build the "Brambles setup record", a single document that shows exactly what Jo owns, where it lives and who can log in. You will use it to renew the domain and bring it under Jo's control with two-factor sign-in, document every DNS record, force HTTPS with a valid SSL certificate, move the site to a new host with a rollback plan, set up business email with SPF, DKIM and DMARC passing, test off-server backups and start a renewals register.

After each step on the Brambles project you repeat it on your own domain. By the end you will have a documented, tidy setup for your own site, and you can check it against the published marking guide in the final practical task to unlock your completion certificate.