Almost every small business in Pakistan starts the same way: a Gmail or Hotmail address on the business card, printed under a company name it has nothing to do with. It works, right up until the moment it costs you something — a corporate buyer who wants an invoice from a real company address, a tender that asks for official correspondence, a customer who quietly wonders whether you are a business at all.
Moving to name@yourbusiness.pk is not a technical project. It takes about ten minutes and costs less than lunch. Here is the whole thing, including the deliverability step most guides leave out — the one that decides whether your mail lands in the inbox or the spam folder.
What a business email address actually needs
Two things, and only two:
- A domain name. This is the part after the @ — yourbusiness.pk, yourbusiness.com, yourbusiness.com.pk. You register it once a year.
- Somewhere to hold the mailboxes. A mail server that receives your messages and lets you read them on your phone, in Outlook, or through a browser.
On any PK Hosting plan the second part is already included, so in practice you are only buying the domain. If you are weighing up a .pk domain against a .com, the short version is that .pk signals a genuinely Pakistani business and reassures local customers, while .com travels better internationally. Plenty of businesses register both and point them at the same place. Our beginner's guide to registering a .pk domain covers the requirements in detail.
Step 1: register the domain
Search for the name you want on our domain search. Keep it short, keep it easy to say over the phone, and avoid hyphens and numbers — you will be reading this address aloud to customers for years.
If the exact .com is taken, do not force an awkward spelling. A clean .pk or .com.pk almost always beats a mangled .com for a business trading in Pakistan.
Step 2: pick a plan that covers your mailboxes
Mailboxes are included with hosting, so you are choosing based on how many people need an address:
- Personal — 5 mailboxes on one domain. Fine for a sole trader or a two-person operation.
- Business — unlimited mailboxes across up to 10 domains. This is the one most small companies want.
- Professional — unlimited mailboxes and unlimited domains, for agencies and anyone running several brands.
Plans start at Rs 699 a month; current pricing is on the pricing page. For most businesses the total cost of looking professional is the domain plus a few hundred rupees a month.
Step 3: create the mailbox
Sign in to your PK Hosting dashboard, open your website under Hosting, and go to the Email tab. Type the part you want before the @ — info, sales, accounts, or your own name — and create it. You get the password once, on screen. That is the entire process.
A sensible starting set for a small business is one personal address for each person, plus info@ as the public address on your website and cards. Resist creating a dozen departmental addresses nobody checks.
Step 4: read your mail wherever you work
Three options, and you can use all of them at once:
- Webmail. Go to webmail.pkhosting.com and sign in with the full address and password. Nothing to install.
- Your phone. Add an account in the mail app using mail.pkhosting.com for both incoming (IMAP) and outgoing (SMTP), with your full email address as the username.
- Outlook or Apple Mail. Same server details. Choose IMAP rather than POP so your mail stays in sync across every device.
The step most guides skip: making sure your mail arrives
This is where do-it-yourself setups quietly fail. A brand new domain sending business mail looks suspicious to Gmail and Outlook unless three DNS records vouch for it:
- SPF lists which servers are allowed to send mail as your domain.
- DKIM signs every message cryptographically, so the receiver can prove it was not tampered with.
- DMARC tells receiving servers what to do when something fails those checks.
Get these wrong and your quotes land in spam — which is worse than a Gmail address, because you will not know it is happening. When your hosting account is created with us, all three are generated for your domain automatically, along with the MX records that route incoming mail. You can see them in the DNS tab of your service page.
One caveat worth knowing: those records only do their job if your domain's DNS is actually managed on the server holding your mailboxes. If your DNS lives somewhere else — Cloudflare, or your registrar's own panel — copy the SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MX records across, or mail will not flow. The DNS tab on your service page shows the exact values to copy.
What it costs, honestly
A domain is an annual fee; hosting is monthly and includes the mailboxes, the website and a free SSL certificate. There is no separate per-mailbox charge on Business or Professional, which is the main difference from the big international providers, where every additional user is billed monthly, per person, forever. For a five-person team that gap compounds quickly.
Common mistakes
- Forwarding everything to Gmail and replying from there. Your replies still show the Gmail address, so customers keep seeing the old one. Set the account up properly instead.
- Using one shared mailbox for the whole company. It works until two people answer the same customer differently.
- Letting the domain lapse. Your email dies with it. Keep it on auto-renew.
- Sending bulk campaigns from your main address. Use a proper mailing platform; one spam complaint can affect your ordinary business mail.
Getting started
Register the domain, choose a plan, and create the first mailbox — you can be sending from your own address this afternoon. Browse hosting plans to see what is included, or search for your domain name to check it is still free.
If you already have a domain registered elsewhere, you can keep it where it is and simply point it at us — tell us what you have and we will walk you through it.
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