When it comes to domains, email, and authentication, it’s all about trusting the tools you use. That doesn’t mean you want the most expensive ones out there because they’re not necessarily the best. We’ve compiled a list of the ones that offer the best value.
Remember that here at DNS Ninjas, we’re lovers of diversification (not keeping all of our eggs in one basket), and that having 2FA (two-factor authentication) on all accounts is a must.
Domain names
Spaceship: The new brand and concept from Namecheap. Namecheap used to offer exceptional value for domain names and some cheap hosting. Yet, over the last 5-10 years, we’ve seen their domain name prices escalate much higher than those of other historically more expensive registrars. Spaceship, on the other hand, offers some good deals on a wide range of different TLDs/extensions. Visit site.
Dynadot: If you’re registering .uk or other country-specific domains, then Dynadot should be your first choice. We’ve used them for years, and their service is good. It also helps that they offer registration of these domain names at lower prices than most other places. Visit site.
Website hosting
Beginner: Hostinger. They offer a good service even though some of their initial reviews a few years ago seemed a little dubious. Great for smaller websites that don’t get much traffic and have servers located across different continents, so you can choose to host your website on a server close to your biggest customer base. They’re a little better than Godaddy, Bluehost, and the other large hosting companies. Visit site.
Intermediate: Cloudways. It’s still a great solution for intermediate users after recently being bought out by Digital Ocean (we knew that a buyout was on its trajectory, even though the support has sucked since we started using them back in February 2017). Visit site.
Advanced: Gridpane & Vultr: These two companies offer great solutions for hosting your business website. Vultr has many different server locations globally and a rock-solid infrastructure. Gridpane offers an exceptional SaaS product that works (even on the free plan). With these two services combined, you’ll be well prepared for any type of growth for your website. Visit Vultr; Visit Gridpane.
There are also more advanced setups with Google Cloud and Amazon AWS, but if you want to use one of those services, it’s probably better to use Gridpane as the control panel that sets up and deploys the server and the WordPress application. If you’re not using WordPress, then use Cloudpanel.
DNS Management
Cloudflare: It’s been our top pick for quite some time because, well, it just works. You can manage all of your DNS records in their dashboard and even use their CDN to cache your website worldwide. If you have a busy site with an international audience, choose the Pro plan so that your website will run faster across the world. One of the key reasons we prefer and recommend Cloudflare is that their DNS servers are fast, too: this will help (indirectly) with initial website page speed load times over other DNS providers. Visit site.
Amazon AWS: Is the leader in many online things for big multi-national companies. If you’re quite techie and your website gets a lot of visitors, then Amazon AWS is the service to use. The setup can be quite technical, though. Visit site.
ClouDNS: Similar to Cloudflare, but it doesn’t have the same security protection levels as Cloudflare. It’s good to have a backup or use it on websites where you don’t want to use Cloudflare, maybe even a different CDN, etc. Visit site.
We don’t recommend using your domain registrar’s DNS service nor that of your hosting company. When something happens they become unreliable.
Business Email Service
Google Workspace: We’ve been using Google’s business email offering since 2010, when it was called Google Apps, which later became GSuite. Having your business email with Google makes things so much easier. You’ll get Gmail’s incredible spam protection and filters: they’ll either reject emails they’ve identified as spam or pop them in the spam folder, which is excellent for keeping spam emails out of your inbox. Also, their suite of apps and programs available offers great value. Sometimes setting up DKIM authentication can be annoying though. Visit site.
Office 365: If you’re used to Outlook, which comes with Office on your computer, then Microsoft offers this solution. It’s not that bad of a product, and many business customers use it, whether small one-person, multi-nationals, or government departments. It’s reliable, but we believe the spam filters aren’t as good as Gmail. Visit site.
Zoho Mail: A solid system that is fairly easy to set up with the setup wizard that runs you through adding all of your DNS records and checks them: this isn’t 100% foolproof, but it’s quite good. It’s also the most cost-effective solution. If you want a lower-cost service and are a single-person business, you can get a reliable solution for less than $15 per year (one inbox with unlimited domains). Visit site.
All the above services allow you to make one account the catch-all email account. However, if you choose this, be careful about how the service “catches” the email and delivers it to your inbox, as it might show as not passing SPF checks even though it passed DMARC.
SMTP
What is SMTP? Standard Internet Protocol for Electronic Mail Transmission, or SMTP for short, is a way to deliver emails from a server to other servers or computers. For example, let’s say you have a WordPress business website, and someone fills in a contact form. For the information on the form they filled out to get to you, it needs to be transmitted. SMTP will transmit that data to your business email inbox. You would also use a service like this for transactional emails: emails from an ecommerce site to a customer about their order.
Postmark: Hands down, one of the best SMTP services you will use, but that comes at a cost if you’re running more than one business website or ecommerce store: their fee per domain (changing in early 2025) is much higher than before. A great service with an intuitive dashboard and detailed information about transactional emails. Visit site.
SMTP2GO: A great SMTP service that offers a free tier for those who want to send different forms or emails from their website or ecommerce store and are in their growth phase. It’s scalable to millions of emails per month, so you have lots of room to grow. Bonus for anyone in Europe who is concerned about GDPR: They automatically place your account on their EU servers if you sign up from a European IP. Visit site.
Amazon SES: Is the global leader, but it can be complicated to set up if you’re not overly technical. It should be a breeze if you know DNS inside and out, but if you haven’t experienced setting up and setting up 90% of the services mentioned on this page, then it’s probably better to choose one of the alternatives. Visit site.
FluentSMTP Plugin (WordPress): If you’re using WordPress, then we recommend using the FluentSMTP plugin to configure how your WordPress website works with your SMTP service. Within a few clicks, you’ll be up and running and able to test that everything is authenticating correctly. Visit site.
Email Marketing
It’s one of the best methods to contact current customers/clients and prospects, so you want to ensure that your service provider is seen as reliable and trustworthy by email service providers (like Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo). You’ll also want to correctly configure your DNS records with the provider to ensure the emails they send for you are authenticated. Otherwise, they might be in spam (or never delivered).
Mailerlite: A reliable email marketing product with some flexibility with a landing page builder and the ability to track signups and send out emails to your audience regularly. A great starter service with room to grow. Visit site.
Get Response: Around for quite a while and is reliable. There are many features even on the smallest plan, whether you want automations, email delivery scheduling, or landing pages on which you can analyze conversions. A solid service and good customer support. Visit site.
Kit (formerly ConvertKit): An excellent solution for serious marketers. If you’re sending a large volume of emails (more than 50,000 per month), head over to Kit. Their onboarding will help migrate everything across, and while it isn’t the most straightforward interface to navigate, once you’re used to it, everything seems to be in the right place. Visit site.
Email Testing
If you want to ensure your emails are fully authenticated and passing DMARC checks by email service providers, then you should be testing them. You should test your emails from three main places: your business email inbox, email marketing service, and SMTP system. All these will be configured differently and should be tested individually to ensure the records in your DNS are aligned. (This includes SPF and DKIM records to ensure DMARC analysis is successful and passes.)
Gmail: A basic way to test whether your emails are aligned. Choose a Gmail account you have and email it from any of the places where you’ll send emails. Then sign in to your Gmail account on your computer, click the three dots next to the reply icon, and select “show original.” This will load up the message headers. You want “SPF,” ” DKIM,” and “DMARC” to all say “PASS.” If they don’t, you’ll need to investigate or use our DNS service to fix things.
Google Apps Toolbox: You can check headers, MX records, and other elements to help you with your emails. The headers checker is a quick way to confirm the output from the Gmail headers above and gather more information about how to solve any emails that aren’t authenticating correctly. Visit site.
Mail tester: A simple mail tester that works. They will give you an email address to send an email to and then provide a complete analysis of how that email will be interpreted by email service providers (like Gmail, Yahoo & Hotmail). They limit you to the number of tests you can do within a day without paying for their service, but there’s no reason you can’t split up your testing over a few days. Visit site.
Aboutmy.email: Similar to Mail tester above, this service provides an email address and gives you a complete analysis of the email and whether it complies with all of the email service providers’ requirements. This is usually good for marketing emails (sent from an email marketing service you use), but you can also use it to test your business emails. It provides a good amount of details covering all of your DNS records for email authentication. Visit site.
DMARC Tester: Tests your DMARC alignment and provides an overview screen about whether tests were passed or not. Their intuitive service provides a step-by-step overview of what happens when a mail server receives your email and the process it goes through. It provides you with an overview of whether DMARC passed. Visit site.
DMARC Reporting
DMARC reporting helps you see whether your emails continue to be authenticated and end up in people’s email inboxes. They also provide information on whether someone is attempting to spoof your emails. Analysis varies across providers, and you’ll usually need a paid plan for anything more than a summary email or dashboard overview.
Cloudflare: If your DNS is with Cloudflare, it makes sense to use their DMARC reporting feature. When you’re in the dashboard, go to Email > DMARC Management and set it up. They’ll even suggest the correct records to add to your DNS, and it can all be done with the click of a few buttons. It’s free, and we recommend it as a starting service.
Postmark: A free monitoring service by Postmark (SMTP provider above). These reports are delivered to your email address every week and show an overview of whether the emails you sent are passing DMARC (aligned) or not: they specify the percentage of emails that are SPF-aligned and DKIM-aligned. It is great for a weekly summary. Visit site.
DMARC Digests: A service from Postmark with more in-depth information and a dashboard with more details. It’s a paid-for service and worth trying out. Visit site.
DMARCLY: If you’re running an ecommerce store or your business is a multi-national, then it’s best to choose a more robust service with forensic reporting and alerts. It’s on the upper end of pricing but has many analysis tools for your organization and could be well worth the investment every month. Visit site.
Reviewing DNS Records
We use three different services to scan DNS records. Sometimes, you might not be able to use one tool to find them all, and in some instances (especially DKIM keys), you’ll need to use an independent tool and know the selector used by the domain owner (some use the default so it can be a little easier). We recommend using MX Tools (a tried and tested service), DNS Checker (gives you lots of choices for what you want), and DNS Dumpster (scans your records and provides a summary: one of our favorite tools).
Choose the Ninjas
Want a reliable service that understands all of the above service providers (and more) and can check, review, and configure all DNS records for your business domain name and website? That’s us, DNS Ninjas. Head to this page and check out our prices.