I really miss having an IT department. I bow down to the IT Lords of my past. I didn’t appropriately appreciate them at the time. Now that I have paid appropriate homage to the IT experts, let me ahem complain!
We host our primary website, CookingChew at WPEngine. I love hosting with them BUT they don’t host email accounts. They are all about hosting websites and nothing else. This makes them friggin awesome as a hosting company BUT…
For a long time, we operated with a gmail account for our business but that doesn’t work out in the long run. Once we got serious about email marketing, we needed a domain based professional email address. Having an email address associated to your domain impacts open rates because it impacts how email providers sort emails.
In other words, Gmail is more likely to consider your newsletter as spam if it comes from an @gmail.com email address. Yes, that is ironic but it is just a reality.
Nothing is ever easy!
Here are the roadblocks that I faced:
- WPEngine doesn’t host email like other hosting companies sometimes do.
- NameSilo allows you to create email addresses but they don’t manage the emails for you. They allow you to either set up email forwarding or recommend an email service provider such as G Suite.
- G Suite works through name servers. My site runs ads using the Ezoic Ad network. They control my name server data. This essentially means that I had to set up my MX records in the Ezoic system.
I didn’t understand ANY of this until I went through it. The NameSilo support team was AHmazing. They have a client for life in me. They spent hours across many days helping me figure this out.
The biggest issue that I had was that I kept changing my name servers in Cloudflare because that is what is the normal process to follow. However, every morning I would wake up and my email wasn’t working again.
Every single night Ezoic was resetting my Cloudflare settings.
After dealing with this for a few days I was quite perplexed. NameSilo support just couldn’t figure out what was happening. Then it dawned on me that when I signed up for Ezoic they set up the ads through Cloudflare. After reaching out to them, they gave me the simple instructions of what to do and I was all set.