Small Business Technology – Part Two Create Custom Domain Email with Zoho

In the first part of the small business technology series Yandex was used to create a custom domain email, and as it was clarified that this email account also gives you access to a layer of free services including office online without any Microsoft account (Outlook/Hotmail).

This guide will present another service through which you can create a free custom domain email which is Zoho as with Yandex, Zoho doesn’t only provide you with an email but also a layer of services like documents, spreadsheets and presentation creation, editing and collaboration. It also provide you with a billing, CRM, project management and many other useful tools for small businesses for free. The number of free seats for every service varies from one to another, for example for the email it’s free for up to 25 accounts per domain and for the docs it’s 5GB per user. Now, without further ado let’s dive into the guide.

Step One

First you’ve to visit Zoho to create an account based on your custom domain.

Step Two

After entering your domain you’ll be directed to a new window where you should sign up for the service, first enter your email information (name and address) and you’ve to add another email (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) that will be used for communication in case any problem arise during the setup process.

Step Three

You’ll be directed to the confirmation window then you’ll be directed to a new window where you should confirm domain ownership. I’ll be using the CNAME record for verification, my domain name registrar is “Hover” which couldn’t be found in the list so I’ll select “others”.

Step Four

log into your registrar panel and then just click on add a new record and select CNAME for the record type and fill in the information using the data provided by Zoho in the previous step. then click on the verify domain ownership tab “Zoho window” seen also in the screenshot above. It will take some time (even a couple of hours) to be able to verify, so just be patient.

Step Five

Now you need to setup the MX records to setup the email, this can be done either through the CPanel or through your domain registrar panel, I’ll be using the registrar panel in this guide, first get Zoho’s required records using the information provided by Zoho as seen in the screenshot below.

Step Six

In your domain registrar panel just edit the MX records using the information from Zoho seen above.

Now you can create your email and log into your account as seen below, you can also add more emails and administer them from a central panel.

Now, for the services layer you get with this free email, in the docs section as stated previously you can create, edit and collaborate on documents, presentations and spreadsheets using Zoho suite, there is a reports, projects, entire CRM suite, instant messaging and many other tools that comes with this registration but as stated previously please check the number of free seats available for free for every service as that number varies wildly. You can tweak Zoho to make it really your own through adding the logo of your business, business information, etc.

This was the second free method by which you can create a custom domain email, in the following guides we’ll cover the office communications, task assignment, tracking, cloud and on premise backup and syncing. Well, Zoho offers some of these features and you can discover it yourself but the following posts will cover some other tools and services and you make the choice which service or tool is best for you.