A webhotel alternative when all you need is email

What a webhotel actually bundles

A webhotel (web hosting) is designed to run a website: disk space for files, a web server, usually a database, PHP or similar, and - almost as an afterthought - a few mailboxes. If you're running a WordPress site, that bundle makes sense. But a lot of people buy a webhotel for one reason only: they need email on their domain, and the webhotel was the obvious place to click "add mailbox".

That's paying for a whole toolkit to use one tool. And webhotel mailboxes are often the weakest part of the bundle - small storage, clunky webmail, shaky deliverability, and support that treats email as a side feature.

You don't need web hosting to have email

Here's the key point: email and web hosting are separate. Your domain's MX records decide where email is delivered, completely independently of where (or whether) a website is hosted. So you can get a real inbox on your domain without any web hosting at all - you just need a service that runs proper mail infrastructure and gives you the MX, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records to point at it.

That's what Mektup is: email for your domain, minus the webhotel. Real inbound and outbound mail, a full webmail dashboard, IMAP and SMTP for Outlook or your phone, and built-in contact forms - and nothing you're paying for that you won't use.

Webhotel vs email-only, side by side

Moving email off a webhotel (without breaking your site)

If you already have a webhotel and only want to move the email part, the process is safe and reversible:

1. Register your domain in Mektup and note the MX, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records it returns.
2. Create your mailboxes in Mektup (for example hello@yourdomain.com).
3. At your DNS host, replace the old MX records with Mektup's and add the TXT records. Leave your A and CNAME records alone - those point at your website, which keeps running exactly as before.
4. Once mail is flowing to Mektup, you can drop the webhotel's email add-on, or the webhotel entirely if the website lives elsewhere.

Because only the MX and TXT records change, your website never goes down during the move - email is the only thing that switches over.

When a webhotel still makes sense

To be fair: if you need to host a website - especially a database-driven one like WordPress - a webhotel or a proper web host is the right tool, and Mektup isn't trying to replace that. Mektup replaces the email half. Many people pair the two: a modern host (or a static host like Vercel or Netlify) for the site, and Mektup for the domain's email and forms. Use each tool for the job it's actually good at.

Get email without the webhotel