Hosting email seperately from website?

Our company has been happily hosted by Dreamhost for several years now. Our HQ is getting ready to have a 3rd party redesign our website, and part of the agreement states that we'll have to host the website on their servers. I'm not happy about that, but hey, you gotta do what HQ says. Thankfully, they don't have a problem with us leaving our email where it is.

That's where my question comes in. How do I do that? I'm guessing that we'd have to do something to our DNS to specify that our email comes to Dreamhost and that our website is hosted somewhere else, but I have absolutely no idea what would need to be done.

Any help is greatly appreciated...

Thanks in advance!

Bump....

When you change over to the other host, you need to change your MX records OVER THERE and add custom records.

The Insane Cabbit
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Where can I find information on how to create those records, and what they should be?

You should ask support what DH's mail servers are or something. I looked to see but I couldn't find it in the wiki. The other host you are using should have mx record somewhere on the control panel for dealing with e-mail. You just add the servers to it (custom mx records).

The Insane Cabbit
My Blog http://www.sounanda.com
My web store:
http://www.marciesgifts.com
Send me a pm if you want cms or forum software installed (for a fee)

You mean the other way around, the MX records stay untouched with email sent to dreamhost.

I would assume you would also leave your DNS with dreamhost as well, they'll just need to change the A/CNAME (? i can never remember which) stuff to point www.xxxx.com to the new hosting company.

Talk to dreamhost support. Either way, it shouldn't be a big deal

We are talking about who's name servers are going to be on your account. If this guy is changing his site to another host, by default their mx records will be used when he switches over. In order to continue using DH for e-mail you will have to change the mx records over there to point to DH.

One last thing, I've not really heard of good experiences with designers who want you to use some sort of preferred hosting just in order to redesign your site. On the few occasions that I've taken on jobs, I never did that. You just get access to the host so you can change anything that needs to be changed and that's it. You do the job and get paid, not host the client -- unless you are doing everything from scratch and they don't even know what a host is so you have to handle it yourself -- and continue to charge them hosting fees -- or get some sort of kickback to bring in customers to that host (because I'm certain there will be hosting fees...). I just now thought about that.

The Insane Cabbit
My Blog http://www.sounanda.com
My web store:
http://www.marciesgifts.com
Send me a pm if you want cms or forum software installed (for a fee)Edited by Ryo-ohki on 01/24/06 05:22 AM (server time).