I am hosting several clients' websites (as well as my own) through a reseller account at a webhosting company. I need to upgrade my account, which means switching servers. All of my domains are registered at www.godaddy.com and hosted through this company. I have also set up a domain host (ns1.mywebsiteaddress.com,
However, the normal process DNS update process can take a couple of days...I don't want to lose email during that time. I have been wondering whether one of the free dynamic dns services would solve that problem. Can I switch my domain host address to a free dns service? If I do that, will I be able to make instantaneous changes to the IP address?
Incidentally, I don't need to switch immediately, but I do want a solution that will prevent/reduce lost emails and require minimal hassle.
Please let me know...if it's possible, I'd like good instructions so that I don't screw it up. ;-)
Thanks for your help.
Wendy
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I was really hoping that I wouldn't have to change email settings - that will be extremely time-consuming. And I'm not really sure how to forward email from mail.domain.com to mail2.domain.com. Any other ideas? I was thinking if there are dynamic dns services, there ought to be some way to use that for an immediate transition.
Thanks,
Wendy
it's very simple , http://www.zoneedit.com/ will do it for you :-)
leave the old servers set up during the transition as well as firing up the new ones. During the transition of DNS servers there will be a period of about 6 hours during which half of the users will go to the new DNS servers and half to the old, if they are all able to accept the mail and websites etc then you wont lose mail - an even better solution would be to set up the new and old DNS servers to all point to the same IP's for mail etc then you wont even need to have 2 web/mail servers running
The best, most efficient procedure I've found to move sites without any (or very little anyway) downtime is listed below.
1) Drop the TTL of *ALL* your existing domains down to 5 minutes (360 seconds) and allow this information to propagate for a couple of days (you can wait 3-4 if you really want to be on the safe side)
This setting should be available from your reseller control panel, in cPanel you will probably see the default value of 14400, simply replace this value with 360 and hit save.
2) Once the appropriate propagation time has passed, you can begin to copy your accounts to the new server.
3) As soon as your accounts have been transfered, log into your old account and modify the DNS entries of your site so that the IP in your old records are changed to point to your new server and then save your changes.
These changes should take 5-10 minutes to show up, you can verify the changes are correct through www.dnsstuff.com, if the results show the IP of your new server then all is well and you can move onto the next step.
4) Update your Nameserver entries at Godaddy to point to your new nameserver entries.
This change will take a couple of days to show up but in the mean time your old name servers are handing out the IP of your new account so your not losing anything
5) After a 3-4 more days have passed check your DNS info again at dnsstuff.com, this time you should see the Nameserver section has been updated to reflect your new nameservers,
At this point it is safe to cancel your old account as no email, DNS or web traffic should be hitting it.
I've used this method to transfers hundreds of sites from server to server and it has worked flawlessly every time. If you have any questions just let me know.
as long as u keep your old mailserver up and running you shouldn't lose any mail, as mail can still be delivered to both the olkd and new mailservers during dns propergation. So you can still pickup mail from the old server.
Alternately, if you have a decent mailserver, it should have an option to download mail from another account. So when you setup the new mailboxes on the new server, you can also tell them to colelct mail form the mailboxes on the old server.
Russ
eBoundary, your solution sounds most like what I was looking for, but I have a few questions:
I'm on shared hosting so I can't change the TTL myself, but the TTL for the server is 3600 (=60 minutes, right?). So I guess that's OK. Where am I making changes on step 3? The only place I see to change DNS info is at GoDaddy...but wait a minute...I see I've set up all my accounts as name-based sites, but it appears there is an option for IP-based sites as well? Is that the step I'm missing?
I'm using the Ensim control panel. Can I change the sites to be IP-based instead of name-based? Is the the step I need to take care of the transition?
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by: periwinklePosted on 2004-07-27 at 10:13:07ID: 11648564
You will need to overlap services in order to not lose email. What I've done in the past is to set up a new name for the new mail server - say mail2.yourdomain.com - and point that to the new server. Then, I forward the email from yourdomain.com to mail2.yourdomain.com, and have the clients switch over to using mail2.yourdomain.com. Then, I transfer the rest of the services and switch dns - and after testing, and when I'm convinced all is well, I discontinue the old server.