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raymondu999

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 11, 2008
1,009
1
Hey all.

I'm recently taking over the IT side of a non-profit organisation which previously had a non-IT person handling IT. As such I'm trying to consolidate the IT and restructure it in a way that is IT-efficient.

Their Top-Level Domain was registered through Google Enterprise Apps, through Google Domains. The registrar is Enom. Their website is hosted on hostmonster, as a WHOIS lookup shows. Emails are opened through Google Apps.

I've handled situations where website and email were hosted together at the same place, but I've never seen such situations where email goes to one place and website points to another.

I'm planning to shift everything through to Hostmonster (to save costs - our NPO is small) including email. Currently the domain is managed through the Google Enterprise Apps control panel, under Domains. How can I shift everything through to Hostmonster? Obviously it's not an issue with pointing the dns servers to Hostmonster, because that's done. I want to move the email service now though. Do you all know?

Thanks.
 

SrWebDeveloper

macrumors 68000
Dec 7, 2007
1,871
3
Alexandria, VA, USA
...Obviously it's not an issue with pointing the dns servers to Hostmonster, because that's done. I want to move the email service now though. Do you all know?

Thanks.

DNS is intended to be flexible in this way.

Based on the fact you said the DNS servers are pointing to Hostmonster, in their control panel you need to first remove all MX records pointing to the google apps servers (might be up to 5 entries) and add set at least one primary and optionally one secondary out of band MX record, if any. Here is help for all this: https://my.hostmonster.com/cgi/help/mx

FYI:

MX = Mail exchange, the primary record is the one you set first as default with lowest priority value, the secondary is the other - usually an offsite backup mail server if one is setup which processes and queues mail if the primary is offline and unreachable (out of band, as it's sometimes called).
 

Consultant

macrumors G5
Jun 27, 2007
13,314
34
A good domain host will be able to help you with the transfer / change, especially if you are moving things to their own services.
 

jtara

macrumors 68020
Mar 23, 2009
2,008
536
I don't think it is ever a good idea to use the same provider for hosting, DNS, and registration. At least separate registration. There is too much of a risk of having your domain held "hostage" over some business issue, etc. You might have a business dispute, or the company might run into financial trouble and discontinue service, leaving you in the lurch.

Sign-up with another registrar (I like Moniker). Most have very similar pricing - they are almost all pretty cheap nowadays. Your new registrar will handle the details of transfer from enom. You will have to go through a bit of rigamarole with emails and authorization codes.

I like to keep my DNS separate, as well. I use DnsMadeEasy. They have a great infrastructure and their UI is geared toward easily managing multiple domains, with a minimum of annoying up-sales BS.

This gives you maximum flexibility for your site to survive anything from natural disaster to crooks to a company going belly-up. How would you like to not be able to change your host for several months while the financial failure of a registrar is sorted-out? Well, it has happened. With separate DNS, while you cannot change your registration details, you CAN change your DNS information. If the registrar is providing DNS you could be stuck. What if you want to add a new host? You can't.

A bit less bad if you host your DNS with your web host. If the web host goes belly-up, you can still go to the registrar (assuming they didn't also fail, and if both did, we probably have bigger problems to worry about...) and point the domain to a new DNS host.

These "free" services are not worth the business risk.
 
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