Business Email Hosting in India (2026)
Business email puts your team on your own domain, such as sales@yourbusiness.in. There are three common routes in India: mailboxes included with a cPanel hosting plan, Google Workspace, or Microsoft 365. Hosting email is the cheapest; Workspace and Microsoft 365 add bigger mailboxes and office apps per user. Whichever you pick, set SPF, DKIM and DMARC so your mail reaches inboxes.
A business email address on your own domain is one of the cheapest trust signals you can buy. A quote from sales@yourbusiness.in reads very differently from one sent by yourbusiness123@gmail.com, and the address stays with the company when people leave.
This guide compares the three ways most Indian businesses get email on their domain, shows the published prices where we could check them, and explains the DNS records that decide whether your mail lands in the inbox or in spam.
What business email hosting means
Every domain can receive email, but only once you point it at a mail service. That service stores the mailboxes, sends and receives messages, and gives your team webmail and phone access. The pointer is a set of MX records in your domain’s DNS. Change those records and mail starts flowing to a different provider.
So “business email hosting” is really two decisions: who stores the mail, and who manages the DNS that points to them. If you have not registered your domain yet, you need that first; our domain search shows the renewal price before you buy.
Your three options at a glance
| Email with your hosting plan | Google Workspace | Microsoft 365 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you get | Mailboxes on the same cPanel server as your website | Gmail on your domain, plus Calendar, Meet, Drive and Docs | Outlook on your domain, plus Teams and Office apps on most plans |
| How it is priced | Included with the hosting plan | Per user, per month | Per user, per month |
| Published price | Hostlyx: Starter ₹799 a year with 25 email accounts, up to Ultimate ₹3,999 a year with 5,000 | Business Starter ₹270 per user a month before tax (Google’s India pricing) | See Microsoft’s India comparison page |
| Good for | Small teams that mainly need reliable mail | Teams that already live in Gmail and Google Docs | Teams that work in Word, Excel and Outlook |
When we checked Google’s India pricing page in November 2026, it listed Business Starter at ₹270 and Business Standard at ₹1,080 per user per month, both before tax, with 30 GB of pooled storage per user on Starter and 2 TB on Standard. It also showed a lower-priced Base plan at ₹99 for up to 20 users, and introductory discounts on some plans. Offers change, so read the page on the day you buy.
Microsoft’s India page lists Business Basic, Business Standard and Business Premium, but its rupee prices did not load for us, so we have not quoted them. Check the page directly and ask whether the figure includes GST and whether it needs an annual commitment.
Email included with hosting
Every Hostlyx web hosting plan includes email accounts on your domain: 25 on Starter (₹799 a year), 500 on Economy (₹1,299), 1,000 on Deluxe (₹2,999) and 5,000 on Ultimate (₹3,999), each renewing at the same yearly price. Mailboxes work in webmail and in the mail apps on phones and laptops.
This suits a shop, clinic, consultancy or small office where people need to send and receive mail reliably and do not need shared calendars or office software from the same provider. The trade-off is storage: mailboxes share the plan’s disk space with your website, so a team that keeps years of large attachments will outgrow a small plan.
Google Workspace and Microsoft 365
Both are priced per person, so the cost scales with headcount. In return you get far more storage per user, shared calendars, video meetings and document tools, plus admin controls such as removing a leaver’s access in one place.
Because the price is per person, run the numbers for your real headcount. Ten people on Business Starter at ₹270 each is ₹2,700 a month before tax, every month, while hosting email for the same ten people is part of a yearly hosting fee. That gap is worth paying when the team uses the shared drive, calendars and meetings every day, and hard to justify when people only send and receive mail. A middle path some businesses take is hosting email for most staff and one or two licences elsewhere for people who need the office suite, using separate addresses or a separate subdomain.
Choose by how your team already works. If staff use Google Docs and Sheets, Workspace is the natural fit. If your accountant, clients and suppliers send Word and Excel files all day, Microsoft 365 avoids format friction. Either way, licences are billed by the provider at the provider’s price; a partner like us charges only for setup and migration work.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC: what they do
These three DNS records prove that mail claiming to come from your domain really did. Without them, your invoices and quotes are more likely to land in spam, and anyone can send mail pretending to be you.
- SPF lists the servers allowed to send mail for your domain.
- DKIM adds a digital signature to each message, checked against a public key in your DNS.
- DMARC tells receiving servers what to do when a message fails those checks, and sends you reports.
Google’s email sender guidelines require everyone sending to Gmail to set up SPF or DKIM, have valid forward and reverse DNS, use TLS, and keep the spam rate reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%. Senders of more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts must have SPF, DKIM and DMARC, with the From domain aligned, and one-click unsubscribe on marketing mail. Even if you send far less, setting all three is the safe default.
A common mistake is adding a newsletter tool or CRM that sends “from” your domain without adding it to SPF and DKIM. Every service that sends as you needs to be included.
Moving from Gmail or an old host
A clean migration keeps every old message and loses no new ones. The usual order is:
- Create the new mailboxes with the same addresses.
- Copy existing mail across from the old provider.
- Lower the time-to-live on the MX records a day ahead, so the change spreads quickly.
- Switch the MX records, then add or update SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
- Run a final copy to catch anything that arrived during the switch.
- Reconnect phones and laptops to the new server.
If you are moving your website at the same time, our guide to moving a website to a new host without downtime covers the DNS side in more detail.
Which option fits your business
- Fewer than a handful of people, mainly sending quotes and replies: hosting email is usually enough.
- Team already uses Google Docs, Drive and Meet: Google Workspace.
- Team works in Word, Excel and Outlook all day: Microsoft 365.
- Large attachments, long retention or strict admin controls: a per-user plan.
- You send newsletters or bulk mail: use a dedicated sending service and add it to SPF and DKIM, rather than sending from staff mailboxes.
Getting business email set up
Hostlyx sets up business email on your own domain, whether that is mailboxes included with your hosting or a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 tenant, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured and old mail migrated. Indian customers are billed by Zorixo Creations Private Limited with GST. Tell us how many people need mail and where it lives today, and we will send a fixed written quote for the setup.