Does an SME or growing business need an email and hosting?
Email
You should definitely have an email account which should be included with your hosting. Ideally this account should have the same domain name (eg yourname@domainname.co.uk) as your website.
This makes it easier for people to remember, makes more people likely to visit your site and helps increase your brand awareness.
If you have an existing email account that is not the same as your website then it is easy to have a forwarding address set up which prevents you from having to change anything.
Hosting
Your website has to live somewhere. All the code, images and text are stored on a computer somewhere where it is served to the internet. These computers are known as servers. Hosting consumes resources (management time, electricity, disk space etc) and so there is a fee that you are charged, usually on a yearly basis for maintaining this service.
Also this will usually include something called DNS (Domain Name Service) Hosting which is all about registering your preferred website address name and hooking it up to your website so that when people type www.yourname.co.uk into their web browser they see your beautiful website.