Domain and business email: choosing them without losing control

What a domain is and what depends on it

A domain is a name (yourbusiness.es) that you rent for one or more years through a registrar. You don't buy it forever: you renew it for as long as you want to keep it. Your website, your email and often the verification of services like Google, Meta or your payment gateway all hang off it.

It helps to separate three pieces that are often sold together but aren't the same thing:

• Registrar: the company where the domain is registered and where you pay the renewal.
• DNS: the domain's “address book”, which tells the world which server hosts the website and which provider handles email. It can live at the registrar or elsewhere.
• Hosting and email: the servers where the website and the mailboxes live. They can be different providers from each other and from the registrar.

How to choose the name

What matters most isn't the ending but the name. Think about how your customers will hear and type it: it gets read out over the phone, seen on a van, jotted on a piece of paper. Some criteria that work:

• Short and easy to read out. If you have to spell it, it's too long. Beyond 15 or 20 characters it starts to get hard.
• No hyphens or numbers if possible: people skip them when typing, or don't know whether the number is a digit or a word.
• Avoid ñ and accents. A .es accepts them, but many email programs and forms handle them badly, and anyone on a foreign keyboard can't find them. If your name has an ñ, also register the version without it (with “n” or “ny”).
• The business's name, not a string of keywords. “cheap-garage-madrid” doesn't rank better and looks unprofessional; what gets you into local search results is covered in the local SEO guide.
• Check first that nobody uses that name as a registered trademark in your sector. Searching the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (OEPM) is free and avoids trouble later.

.es, .com or another ending

For a business working in Spain, a .es makes it clear where you are and is usually less taken than the .com. A .com makes sense if you sell abroad or the name is taken in .es. If both are free and the renewal is reasonable, register both and redirect one to the other, so nobody grabs the version you don't use.

The newer endings (.shop, .online, .site, .madrid) exist and work, but they have two drawbacks: many people don't recognise them as an address and add “.com” at the end, and some renew at prices well above the first year's.

The rules for .es

The .es is run by Red.es, a public body, through its website Dominios.es. Any person or company in the world can register one as long as they have ties to Spain, which a business based here easily meets. There are variants with their own conditions: .com.es for anyone, .nom.es for individuals only, .org.es for non-profits and .gob.es for public bodies only.

You can register a .es directly at Dominios.es or, more commonly, through an accredited registrar (agente registrador). The name can't already be assigned or appear on the lists of prohibited or reserved terms that Red.es publishes.

On the Dominios.es website you can look up the public information for a .es. The personal data of registrants who are individuals isn't shown to the public, as is the case for most generic domains since the GDPR came into force.

The domain must be in your name

Whoever is listed as the registrant owns the domain, whoever pays for it. If the designer or agency registers it in their name “to save time”, the day you want to switch providers you'll depend on them transferring it, and if the relationship ends badly or the company closes, you can lose your website and email.

When you register it, or have it registered, ask for this:

• Registrant: you or your company, with the correct legal name and your NIF or CIF.
• Administrative contact: an address you read that isn't on the domain itself (if the domain expires, info@yourbusiness.es stops working just when the notices arrive). It receives renewal notices and approves registrar changes.
• Technical contact: it can be whoever runs your website; it doesn't confer ownership.
• Your own access to the registrar's control panel, with your own username and password, even if whoever runs your website also has theirs.

Prices, renewals and expiry

The most common trap isn't the first year's price but the following years'. Many registrars offer the first year for €1 or free with hosting, then renew at list price. Before registering, find the registrar's renewal price table and check whether they charge separately for things like WHOIS privacy or DNS management.

Turn on auto-renewal and check that the card on file doesn't expire before the domain does. A .es can be renewed for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 10 years, so renewing several years at once is a simple way to take the problem off your plate.

Changing registrar without losing anything

Moving the domain to another registrar (a transfer) is normal if you find a better price or service. The general process goes like this:

• At the current registrar, remove the transfer lock if there is one and request the authorisation code (authcode or EPP code) if the ending uses one, as .com does. The registrar must give it to you as the registrant.
• At the new registrar, start the transfer and enter the code if asked. For a .es, the new registrar sends the request to Red.es and the administrative contact has to approve it.
• Before completing it, note down all the current DNS records (website, email, verifications). If the DNS is at the old registrar, recreate them at the new one so the website and email don't go down.
• For generic domains, the transfer usually includes a year of renewal and can't be done within 60 days of a registration or another transfer.

Don't transfer a domain in the last few days before it expires. If something gets stuck, it can expire in the middle of the process.

Email on your domain: options and prices

An address like bookings@yourbusiness.es inspires more trust than a free account and, above all, it's yours: if you change email provider, the address stays with you and your customers don't need to know. With a free address, the day you switch you'll have to tell everyone.

The usual options, with indicative prices per mailbox per month excluding VAT, on entry plans with an annual commitment:

Keeping your email out of spam: SPF, DKIM and DMARC

Email providers distrust messages they can't verify. Since February 2024, Gmail requires anyone sending to its users to have at least SPF or DKIM, and anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to have SPF, DKIM and a DMARC policy; Yahoo applies similar requirements. Even if you send little email, setting up all three keeps your quotes and confirmations out of spam and makes it harder for someone to send fake emails in your name.

They're three text records in the domain's DNS. Your email provider gives you the exact values:

• SPF: the list of servers allowed to send email on behalf of your domain. There must be a single SPF record; if you use several services (your email and your newsletter tool), they all go in the same one.
• DKIM: a digital signature added to each message that proves it came from an authorised server and wasn't altered on the way.
• DMARC: tells the receiver what to do with an email claiming to come from your domain that fails the checks (nothing, send it to spam or reject it) and where to send you reports.

To check the result, send an email to a Gmail account, open the message and use “Show original”: you'll see whether SPF, DKIM and DMARC show as PASS.

Checklist

Before calling the domain and email done, check that:

• The registrant is you or your company, and you have your own access to the registrar's panel.
• The administrative contact is an address you read and that doesn't depend on the domain itself.
• You know the renewal price, auto-renewal is on and you know when it expires.
• If you have .es and .com, one redirects to the other.
• You have a note of the DNS records and who can change them.
• Email on your domain works, and SPF, DKIM and DMARC show as PASS.
• Role addresses are aliases, not paid mailboxes nobody uses.

If whoever builds your website also manages your domain, ask for these details in writing at handover. At AMG Design the domain always stays in the client's name, including on the maintenance plan.