How To Create A Custom Email on Bluehost with A Squarespace Site

Squarespace makes it SUPER easy to setup a domain based (yourname@yourdomain.com) email for your business.  They work with G Suite (Formerly GoogleApps For Business) to make this process really painless.

It's about $50/year and hosted on the very familiar Gmail platform. With the email come a host of other business tools which are handy. Some of which I couldn't work without. However, there is another cheaper way to get a custom email address to make your business look more professional.

Here's how I set up mine.

Before I moved from Wordpress to Squarespace, I hosted my domain on Bluehost. (If you don't know what Domain Hosting is, I explain it here in newbie-speak.) Bluehost offers an email option with their $3/mo hosting service which is great. However, it should be noted up front that there is a limit to email storage capacity and depending on your package you may have to upgrade. 

Now because I was really busy when I started up my business, I initially went with the G Suite option because messing around in the DNS servers was intimidating, So I just paid $50/year. This was a great decision in the beginning and a great application of outsourcing my weaknesses. 

But as a business owner it's important to take a peak at your P&Ls (Profits and Losses) as you move along and make adjustments and tweaks to increase your profitability.

 

I had learned A LOT about hosting and servers and so I felt more comfortable in Bluehost and knew I could save money by routing my email through them. 

Here's how you can save money too. 

NOTE* This is an advanced tech-tutorial. Adjusting your DNS settings incorrectly could have grave impact on your site functionality, your business and the amount of hair left on your head after pulling it out as a  result of trying to get your site back up on line. 

Creating an email within Bluehost is actually SUPER easy. But it won't work if you have pointed your domain to Squarespace. Where things get hairy is when you start pointing domain back in different directions. So let's just break it down step-by-step.

Step 1. If you host your domain with Bluehost, point your CNAMEs and A Records to Squarespace

There are really easy instructions available (source) on how to point your Bluehost hosted domain to your Squarespace site. If you follow those steps correctly, (which is a matter of copy/paste into your DNS zone) you should have something that looks like this (it looks way more intimidating than it really is) :

This is a necessary step to get your site up and running on Squarespace if your domain is with Bluehost.

However, when you do that, BlueHost also tries to route your EMAILS with that domain name to Squarespace, which obviously is NO BUENO. Squarespace doesn't do email. They outsource that baby to Google.

So here's how you get around that EMAIL routing issue.

Step 2. Log into Bluehost and go to Domains > Zone Editor.

• Select your domain that you want to edit.

• Add an A record with the following information.

• Which then should look like this once added

• Then delete the current MX Record and add one that looks like this (replacing 'yourdomain' with your actual domain):

Once that's done, you can create that actual email account which takes about 3 minutes.

 

Step 3. Create the Email Account in Bluehost.

• Go to Hosting > Email and click create a new email account.

• Follow the prompts and type in the email name you want that will be name@yourdomain.com and click Create

Once that's done, you can add it to the email client of your choice (I use MacMail) so that it appears directly on your desktop app or phone!

Now you've just saved $50/year which you can either save or re-invest someplace else in your business!! 

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