By choosewisely on

Quick question that I hope someone will be able to help me with.

I have designed a Drupal site for someone and am trying to get it online. Currently they have 2 hosting packages:

  • Hosting A: Which hosting the old site I have redesigned for them
  • Hosting B, which hosts some other websites they have

Unfortunately Hosting A does not support MySQL and to upgrade it will cost them £216 gross ($353.55) per year (way too expensive)! The good news is Hosting B supports PHP & MySQL so I have uploaded it to anotherdomain.com/public_html/mywebsite.com, and added an addon domain in Cpanel to redirect this simply to mywebsite.com.

I believe now it's simply a matter of going to Hosting A and changing the nameservers to Hosting B. Basically they want to keep Hosting A as their email provider, but just point to the website at Hosting B.

Can anyone point me in the right direction of what DNS/nameservers to change as I don't want to change things and then for their email to suddenly stop working, as this is vitally important to them.

Many thanks!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

There are three types of DNS records you should know about.

"A" records map a name to an address, ie www.example.com to 172.16.254.1

"MX" records map map a domain name to another domain name for email delivery purposes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MX_record

"CNAME" records map a domain name to another domain name for DNS resolution purposes.

In your case:

* The mail server needs an "A" record domain name, such as mail.example.com. It must NOT have www.example.com, as that is the domain you're moving.

* There should be an MX record announcing that example.com mail is handled by mail.example.com. This will make mail work transparently. Users don't know anything has changed.

* Delete any existing www.example.com records.

* Add a CNAME (preferred) or A record pointing www.example.com to your "hosting B" provider.

* (optional) Also map example.com (no www) to your "hosting B" provider.

jamesoakley’s picture

jamesoakley
Primary language English
Location North Yorkshire, UK
commented

And then, you keep your nameservers pointed to Hosting A. (That is set at the domain registrar, not with the hosting provider). So all traffic to example.com goes to Hosting A, but Hosting A then delegates it to Hosting B (except for e-mail purposes)

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