If you own a custom domain, hosting your domain with us is the easiest and most reliable way to get things set up.
You can host your domain with Fastmail by pointing your domain's nameservers to us, or by registering a domain through us.
Note: Domain hosting is not available to users on Basic plans.
On this page, we'll go over the advantages to hosting your domain directly at Fastmail.
Fastmail domain management advantages
Faster and more reliable email delivery
If you deliver your email to another service first, that email then has to get to Fastmail via an extra hop. That can either be done by setting up a forwarding rule at the remote service or can be by setting up a mail fetch on the Fastmail side. While both of these work, they each introduce an extra step that can cause problems and delay your email.
In the case of forwarding email from the other service to Fastmail, there are also potential problems with modifying the content of the email causing DKIM signatures to break, or breaking other security aspects of the email (such as SPF sending server restrictions), which might cause forwarded email to either be delayed or lost.
In the case of using Fastmail to mail fetch from the other service, because this is inherently a pull model, there will always be some delay in time between the email arriving at the remote service and being pulled to Fastmail. You're also relying on the underlying stability and reliability of the remote services IMAP/POP servers.
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 our 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 that if there are any problems with your DNS, you can contact Fastmail support for assistance.
Aliasing
Alias resolution occurs directly in the MX servers and is forwarded out independent of the IMAP servers. 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.
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.
What we can do
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 you register a domain through Fastmail, your domain will automatically be hosted by us, with no additional setup required. More information is available at our Registering a domain through Fastmail help page.
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.