How To Set Up G Suite on Bluehost cPanel Hosting

Set Up G Suite on Bluehost
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Most bloggers and freelancers create free Gmail, Yahoo ID which is good for personal use, but when you are in the professional space it is always a better idea to use a professional email address.

Good examples are [email protected], [email protected] and so on. It not only adds professionalism to your email ID but also adds credibility to your email.

Imagine the difference between me sending one mail using my personal email and the other via my professional email [email protected]. No prizes for picking which would sound more professional and credible.

Most of the web-hosting companies offer cPanel based email service which is free for a limited number of accounts. But if you are looking for more features such as hangout, docs, etc., I would recommend G Suite, a Google service.

Here, I’m sharing a guide using Bluehost Hosting as an example, which offers cPanel hosting. You can use this tutorial for any other hosting that offers cPanel.

Note: You can also grab hosting from Bluehost now. It offers one free domain. After purchasing hosting you can follow the steps below to set up Google apps.

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Settings Up G Suite Free Trial On Any cPanel Hosting

I don’t recommend using an email account offered by your hosting companies. That is because when you move or change hosting, migrating the email account can be an issue. Whereas, with G Suite, all you need to do is update the Google apps MX records. Smooth and steady.

I also use the same (G Suite) for my sites. It’s been 9 years and I have never faced any issue.

Moreover, for entrepreneurs or bloggers who are looking to get an approved AdSense account, I always recommend using your professional email address to sign up, which helps in the approval process most of the time.

If you have not set up Google apps for your domain yet, you are going to love it and find it very useful in the long run. Let’s get started with this DIY tutorial.

Create Google Apps for Work account
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Click next. On the following page, you will get the domain selection option. In this case, we already have a domain (the free domain we got with Bluehost hosting), so we will select the option that says “Use a domain name I have already purchased“.

Domain selection Google Apps
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Enter your domain name & click on submit.

The next step is to select the domain’s primary email address. I usually create one with [email protected] and later add something under my name. For example, [email protected].

Create Google Apps Email address
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If you have a startup, you should create either of the following email addresses:

Fill out other details like organization name, address and alternate email address. While selecting your alternate email address, use something that you always have access to, as it will be helpful to retrieve passwords if you lose your G Suite login password.

Once you have filled out all the details, scroll to the bottom, read and accept their TOS and click on “I accept, create my account”!

Create Google apps account
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On the next page, you will be inside your G Suite dashboard and you can start by domain verification:

Google Admin
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The very first thing which is required here is to verify your domain ownership. Here is a video that explains, why it’s required and how you can verify domain:

There are many ways you can verify, and I prefer the HTML tag method in Alternate methods, which is quick. Simply add the meta tag in your site header and it will be verified instantly. If you have bought a domain from GoDaddy or Enom, you can refer to this tutorial for verification.

Google apps domain verification
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Once you have verified your domain, you will get a congratulatory message similar to “Congratulations, you have successfully verified your ownership of domain.com”.

Click on continue. On the next page, you can add more users and configure various settings like email, calendar and other services that come free with G Suite.

If you ever get lost, you can always add more users under “Organization and users” tab.

Once you have done all this, you will be able to access your Google apps email account at http://mail.google.com/a/domain.com but will not be able to send emails yet.

You need to update your MX record from cPanel for sending emails. You can also enable SSL feature to enhance the security of your Google apps by going to Domain settings > General > SSL.

G Suite Wizard Setup On Bluehost

So far, we have verified the domain ownership and done the basic setup of Google apps standard account.

Now, we need to make some changes to your Bluehost cPanel.

Bluehost offers Google apps Wizard which makes the setup very easy.

Any cPanel hosting companies can add this Wizard on their hosting using this plugin.

Check out Bluehost Hosting.

Also, Here is the guide to create a company Blog on Bluehost

Login to Bluehost cPanel and under domain click on DNS zone editor.

DNS zone editor Bluehost
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On the next page, select the domain name which will show all the DNS records associated with the domain. What we are interested in here is to configure the MX record that would help us configure Google apps. Delete the existing MX record and refer to the screenshot below for adding the new MX record.

MX record Google apps
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For any other hosting, you need to add this MX record for working on Google apps. You can delete all existing entries under MX record of cPanel:

Google Apps MX record
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Since Bluehost offers a handy wizard, we don’t need to do it here. But you need to enter this manually in any other cPanel hosting which doesn’t offer the Google apps wizard.

Optional step: If you wish to use mail.domain.com to access your email accounts (which is handy), simply add the following line in your MX record:

Mail.domain.com
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Under G Suite settings > Email > URL, select mail.domain.com as access URL. It may take up to 48 hrs before all DNS change is reflected and you will bee able to use all the features.

I usually recommend creating your domain specific social services like Twitter, YouTube and other social networking account using your professional domain email, as it will be convenient when you are selling your blog.

Helpful points:

  • To access Google apps account: https://www.google.com/a/your_domain.com
  • Setup custom logo under apps dashboard.  Domain Settings > appearance
  • Use this free service to check and verify MX records.

Go ahead and set up Google apps standard email for your website or organization for free. Let me know if you are stuck anywhere in the process and I would come to the rescue.

If you find this tutorial useful, don’t forget to share it on Facebook and Google Plus. You can also subscribe to my email newsletter for more such tutorials.

Further reading:

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

5 thoughts on “How To Set Up G Suite on Bluehost cPanel Hosting”

  1. syberknight

    thanks for the post!
    i have some questions tho…

    in the Bluehost Zone File Records page, i have apparently correctly configured the MX records as email IS working. BUT, i couldn’t find any documentation to tell me what i should do about these other items…

    the “A (Host)” section has an entry/row that has “mail” in the “host record” column, & points to the Bluehost IP address (66.147.242.194). do i need to remove/delete that OR change the IP to Google’s (not sure what that would be) or something else? if i leave it alone, will that conflict with the MX records in any way?

    likewise, the “CNAME” section has entries for “imap”, “pop”, & “smtp” all pointing to “mail.mydomainname.com”. do i need to also change that to point to Google in some way?

    and lastly, the “TXT” section has an entry for “@” which value is “v=spf1 a mx ptr include:bluehost.com ?all”. i read somewhere to instead use “v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all”, so i replaced the bluehost one with the google one. is that correct as far as you know?

    i found the Google documentation to be very lacking – in no instance did it correctly describe what to do & where. it didn’t even talk about doing the spf thing, but other sites say it’s very important.

    additionally, Google’s docs say i should find a custom string to put in to the TXT records area, but my “Setup” area does NOT have any such information. i also read somewhere that i shouldn’t need to re-validate my domain, since i’ve done it before; but we just moved to Bluehost, so shouldn’t i have some way for it to tell Google it’s at a new host?

    thanks for your time & assistance.
    -jason.

  2. Ashutosh Verma

    How to setup google apps on godaddy ?
    please reply fast

  3. Mohamad AlSaadi

    Dear Sir,

    I ‘ registerd my domain on godaddy.com, my web hosting is on google Apps i have 10 user free now temperory, but I have also a web hosting on Bluehost, w i need to configer the webhosting on bluehost and i will keep the mailhosting on google apps, please help me to configer the MX records on Godaddy.

    thx in advance

  4. Gautham Nekkanti

    BlueHost is one of the best hosting providers ever, I’m currently using it. Thanks for the installation guide for Google App standard

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