Hosted domains

Hosting your domain with us is the easiest way to get things set up and working immediately. When you host your domain at Fastmail, we do the hard work for you so your email and Fastmail hosted websites work immediately, with the most complicated DNS setups done for you.

This is a good option for anyone who wants to use Fastmail for email and who does not have a website hosted at another website provider. If you have a website hosted elsewhere but would still like to use Fastmail for hosting your domain, you can still do this, but it might need extra preparation.

You can switch domain hosting to Fastmail by switching your nameservers. If you would like to talk about which domain hosting option is best for your particular circumstances, contact our support team.

Domain hosting is not available for accounts on our Basic plan.

What we can do

Email

Fastmail has been hosting email for over 20 years. We make it easy to set up your email and get it wherever it needs to go. So if you have domains that you haven't set up with email because you thought it was too hard, try it with Fastmail. See the Setting up your domain help page to get started.

You can accept email for specific addresses (e.g. joebloggs@example.com) or for all addresses at your domain. You can direct email to any account, whether it's your own or someone else's. We can also handle subdomains, so you can use addresses like amazon@joebloggs.example.com to more easily classify your email.

Domain registration

If your Fastmail account is more than 7 days old, you can buy a domain through Fastmail. If you buy your domain through Fastmail, it will be set up immediately to work with Fastmail, with no additional setup required. See our Registering a domain through Fastmail help page for more information.

DNS

We can host DNS for your domain no matter which registrar you've chosen. We set up sane defaults so email and websites (in your file storage) just work. We give you a simple control panel to set A, MX, CNAME, and more records to any values you want.

Websites/photo galleries/redirects

You can publish websites to your whole domain, or a sub-domain, or a path within a domain in one of three ways:

  • Host a simple website with static HTML pages and linked images from any directory in your file storage area.
  • Create an instant photo gallery just by uploading photos into a directory of your file storage area.
  • Create a redirect to another URL.

Webmail login

Our default DNS will point http://mail.example.com to a login screen where you can login to your email account.

Users in your domain

Create users in your own domain, so rather than joebloggs@fastmail.com, you can create an account directly in your domain as joebloggs@example.com.

What we don't do

Domain registration transfer from another provider

While Fastmail does offer the ability to register domains, it is not currently possible to transfer a domain you have registered at another domain registrar to Fastmail. 

You can still host the domain you have bought at another provider with Fastmail, and we offer easy instructions to do so.

Webhosting with database/scripting/PHP

You can publish any directory in your file storage area as a website, or have it display any uploaded photos as a photo gallery, or set up redirects to other sites. We don't do any dynamic sites that require server side scripting (e.g. PHP, ASP.Net, etc.) or databases.

Fastmail domain management advantages

There's a number of reasons to host DNS for your domains at Fastmail and to point your MX records directly to our servers:

Better spam protection

We do a lot of work at the SMTP stage (when email is transferred from an external system to Fastmail) to try and identify spam bots and block them while letting legitimate email through. Unfortunately many of these processes can only work when the MX records for your domain point directly to our servers. If you point the MX records to another system, and forward from that system to Fastmail, we can't do the spam bot detection, and so more spam will get through.

To give you an idea of how effective this is, one of our users — the author, Simon Cann (http://simoncann.com/) — changed over the MX records for his Noise Sculpture domain (http://noisesculpture.com) to point to us instead of using a forwarding service. After doing so, he had the following to say:

As you suggested, I pointed the MX records for the Noise Sculpture domain at Fastmail and have been blown away by the results. I'm now getting maybe three or four pieces of spam in a day and the few pieces of spam that are getting through are being correctly identified as spam and put in the Junk Mail folder

Simon went on to explain why he hadn't made the change sooner:

I came to Fastmail a year ago following an unexpected and highly inconvenient melt down of my web host who was also by default my email host for my domain. This was embarrassing and potentially lost me business (I was in the middle of pitching a book proposal to a group of literary agents).

On signing up with Fastmail I immediately pointed the simoncann.com MX record at Fastmail. My other website for my music-related books (Noise Sculpture) was hosted by a different web host and so I forwarded all of my email from that domain to Fastmail. I didn't see a need to change the MX record — the web host was working well (still is) and I couldn't be bothered to start hacking the DNS records.

Long story short, as the simoncann.com and noisesculpture.com emails were sent to a single Fastmail account, I hadn't realized how much simoncann.com spam was getting killed by Fastmail. However, now that I have changed the MX record for noisesculpture.com, I can see just how much spam was getting through from that domain because I was using forwarding rather than pointing the MX records.

This change has stunned me (in a very good way). I'm so impressed with the change (allied with your excellent service) that I've just renewed my Fastmail subscription to cover the next few years.

Fewer places to deal with

If you point the nameservers for your domains to us so that we host the DNS for your domain, you can use the Custom DNS screen to set up whatever DNS you want for your domain, removing yet another middleman (e.g. no limited registrar DNS panel or ZoneEdit required). This also means if there's any problems, there's one place to go to: us. It makes it easier to see that the DNS is all correctly set up and working for your domain, and means that you can't get into a situation where each side is passing the buck to the other.

Aliasing

Alias resolution occurs directly in the MX servers and is forwarded out independent of the IMAP servers. So if you set up a domain and aliases at Fastmail, and have external targets on those aliases for backups, the expanded alias on emails will always be forwarded out of Fastmail to your backup.

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