DNS – How to Change Web Host with Minimal Email Downtime

domain-name-systememailshared-hosting

In a question related to making a smooth transition to a new shared hosting provider, I want to move the email and web sites as smoothly as possible. I am a developer but have gotten into consulting my friend on what to do.

Company S currently has us using a Google AFYD account for our email. Therefore I can access my email via the web and Google's site. Am I correct in thinking even if the DNS mumbo jumbo that was setup to match mail.DOMAIN.com to the AFYD account goes away, I can still access the account (if it isnt' shut down by the admin)? CrystalTech will be hosting our new email and I have a web interface with them as well that I can get to via a unique URL.

But the customer is adament that her company cannot use webmail for more than a day, and even that day would be painful.

How can I move the email server to the new host with the least amount of downtime?

Clarification
– Their office uses entourage, so all email is in their clients.
– I have already setup the new hosting with similar accounts to the old
– We have instructions on how to setup the email client for the new host
– Web mail should be available as a backup in case it all goes to heck.

please see https://superuser.com/questions/93009/how-to-change-web-host-for-my-small-site-with-minimal-downtime for more questions about migrating the website

Best Answer

I gave the answer on your other question.

Your best bet is to pre populate the DNS with all the relevant MX records on your new provider before moving nameservers.

This will mean that you will have ZERO downtime as no matter what stage the changeover is at, a query to either the old or new DNS server will get resolved.

... even if you wanted to switch email providers, you can still get zero downtime by doing something similar - create all mailboxes on the new provider and then update DNS to point to the new place. Set up all clients to login to both old and new providers. You will still get emails on the old mailboxes until every cache expires, but after this, the new one will simply start getting all the emails... then simply deactivate/delete the old mailboxes when you know it is finished with.

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You will need to make sure that your new nameserver has the exact same MX records as the old nameserver before you do the switch. Just as long as both of them are idential, you won't have any issues, because regardless of which nameserver is queried, they will both offer up the same MX records.

Configure DNS Records for Separate Web Host and Email Server

[Frankly, you have so much pretend data here that this is probably going to be unnecessarily confusing. I'll try to keep everything straight.]

If I understand your question correctly, you currently have the following DNS records:

example.com.      A   1.2.3.4
example.com.      MX  10 example.com.
www.example.com.  A   4.5.6.7

...and a bunch of unspecified CNAME records. Also, there exists:

some.other.host.  A   2.3.4.5

...hosting your new website.

You want example.com (and presumably www.example.com) to point to your new site without disrupting email.

Try this:

Register mx.example.com as a new A record pointing to 1.2.3.4. Update the MX record for example.com to point to mx.example.com. At this point, you'll have:
```
example.com.      A   1.2.3.4
mx.example.com    A   1.2.3.4
example.com.      MX  10 mx.example.com.
www.example.com.  A   4.5.6.7
```
Now wait at least twice the TTL for your records to make sure the old MX record has time to expire from DNS caches.

Next, update the A record for example.com and www.example.com to point to your new site. You'll end up with something along the lines of:

example.com.      A   2.3.4.5
example.com.      MX  10 mx.example.com.
mx.example.com.   A   1.2.3.4
www.example.com.  A   2.3.4.5

At this point, I think you have what you want. Email continues to be handled by your existing mail server, but your web presence has been moved onto your new host.

Best Answer

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Configure DNS Records for Separate Web Host and Email Server

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