email host elsewhere?

Greetings,

I'm not planning on moving my emails but I was wondering how I would do this if I wanted to......

Currently my registrar is Godaddy and DH for the web/email hosting.

If I wanted DH to be web hosting, and someone else for the email hosting ....

how would I do this?

@ godaddy, you only set the NS servers, no settings (@ least that I see) to change the MX records ...

would I change the MX records @ godaddy or at DH?

thanks for any help :)

also, if I'm hosting multiple domains but eventually if I want to transfer one of the domains to someone else (with their own plan on DH) is this possible to do with little/no downtime?

:)

I'd set DreamHost as my DNS servers. Here you can do a pretty good job of customizing your DNS.

Leave all DNS settings the same, but go into the Control Panel under Mail and select MX to set your custom MX records and tell DreamHost not to accept mail for your domain. Theoretically, since I haven't tried this myself.

-Scott

You set your MX servers with Dreamhost. Leave GoDaddy as is (pointing to Dreamhost's DNS servers), log into your Dreamhost control panel, go to the Mail tab on the left. Click on Edit for the domain you want, and put in the MX servers given to you by your outside email host. It starts working pretty much instantly :)

thanks! was for the longest time curious who I would change that with (godaddy or DH) :P .... I have no plans to change though. I love that your emails go away from your hosting package space (20gb+) instead of putting an artificial limit like my previous host at "100MB" ... and then your emails start bouncing.

:)

Any info about the last question above?

:)

The downtime you'll experience will be due to DNS propagation. Someone else at DreamHost will most likely be on a different server with a different IP address.

So if the new site is the same as the old site, the transfer will appear seamless, but if you're using a database that gets constantly updated, it'll be a bit tricky.

-Scott

sdayman: so I 'would' be able to transfer one of the domains I'm hosting to someone else who just bought their own DH package?

thanks for the help! :)

I don't think you can transfer it internally. You'll have to transfer the domain name through the registrar, and the domain contents manually (i.e. do a full backup of the content and the databases and FTP it over to their account). Plus re-setup the email accounts.

-Scott

out of curiosity .... if I didn't want DH to be my webhost, but only use DH for email hosting (thus, webhosting would be elsewhere) ... is this possible?

:)

Only if you could configure your MX records wherever your DNS records are kept. Or just full DNS control. DreamHost doesn't quite offer *full* DNS control, just enough for small stuff such as hosting your email elsewhere (the opposite of what you asked about).

-Scott

You can do what you want by using 3rd party nameservers. I have my important websites set up on ZoneEdit.com -- it's free for the first 5 domains.

This way you do cool stuff like setting up round-robin load balancing for your site between different hosts, splitting up your web/email hosting, etc., even setting up backup email servers to receive mail if your primary is unreachable.

I first looked into it when one (small) webhost was hacked pretty thoroughly and was down for about 4 days, including their nameserver -- it takes a *long* time to propagate the new nameserver info, sometimes days (so my sites just disappeared!) but with 3rd party nameservers if that ever happens again I can just update the DNS records on the *same* nameservers, to point to a backup host, and that propagates within minutes.

It also lets me host a subdomain to a primary website on a different server/webhost from the primary domain (the www.domain.com and domain.com A records).

jtheory: are there other 3rd party name servers? would godaddy provide this service? I would think they would, but maybe they don't?

Also, in regards to loadbalancing .... how would this be done? via a script of some sort?

:)

Round Robin load balancing means that you have multiple IP addresses (servers) for your site, and DNS will somewhat randomly pick one of them to return for your DNS query.

-Scott

How would you enter the DNS so that it randomly chooses an IP to serve the page? When you enter "ns1.dreamhost.com, ns2.dreamhost.com" doesn't it always use the first one until it goes down?

? :)