Changing Hosting Service (Kinda Urgent!)

[ArkiStan]

Sorry guys this may be a really simple question, but after trying to google the solution I'm really confused.

My GF runs a business that relies heavily on emailing clients in other countries. For quite a while her web hosting service (simplehost) has been giving her a lot of trouble. A lot of her emails never reach the recipient (mostly foreign) and it's hurting her business, which is currently in peak season. She suspects that the hosting service is so notorious for spam that some foreign services block all emails that come through her hosting service (does this really happen?). So she's signed up for Apple's MobileMe service and wants to change her email and website to work with it. The website (www. domain.com) can wait , but she really needs to switch over her email address ([email protected]) ASAP. What are the basic steps to do this, and hopefully with minimal email downtime?

FYI, she has a macbook and uses an email client application to download her mail from the hosting service through POP3 access (I think). I assume all this will involve switching her domain, and a slew of other procedures. I'm not very familiar with all this. Thanks in advance!

[Jeffbx]

Yes, if she's on a provider that sends a lot of email, the entire domain could be blacklisted as :spam:

The bad news is that it can be blocked based on IP or domain name, so if her domain is blacklisted, not only will you have to move her mail to a different provider, you might have to go through the exercise of finding out what blacklists her domain is on - here's an example of a blacklisting company: http://www.emailclean.com/spamfighter/spamfighter.html

But to change her email only, all you need to do is change the MX record on her DNS server. (The MX record is the pointer to the mail server.) So you'll need the address of her new mail server, and then you'll need to make a request to whoever hosts her DNS to redirect the MX record to that address.

The good news is that there will be no email downtime - the mail will just stop being delivered to one server & start showing up on the new one once the change propagates.

[ArkiStan]

Thanks for the reply Jeffbx.

But!!!....turns out that MobileMe doesn't support hosting for other otherdomain.com email addresses! In the end, I've ended up transferring her domain and hosting to my own company's hosting service which has been pretty reliable so far. We'll have to wait and see if that helps the situation. If not, I'll have to look into whether the domain itself has been blacklisted at all.

Oh well. I guess she wasted a bunch of money on the mobileme service, but at at least I learned a lot about hosting, servers, domains, etc. Thanks for the tips, Jeffbx! I'll kepp you updated.

[ArkiStan]

OK. so got everything with the mail is sorted out for now. Thanks for your help Jeffbx.

As I said earlier I just transfered her whole domain to my hosting service and now all the mail is coming through smoothly. The only issue now is that ever since the domain was transfered, her website is down. I understand what the problem is. The domain address has been transfered to my hosting service but all the actual website content files are still at her old hosting service. So when you type in the website address it just shows a default "This page parked courtesy of XYZ hosting service" default messages. We've decided not to move all the website files over since she's going through a redesign of the website soon so for now we just want to keep the old files at her old service and have people redirected there until the new website redesign is finished.

How do I go about doing this?

[Jeffbx]

You can do a redirect from your page right back to theirs, but better choice would be to just FTP a copy of her site from there & pop it on your server. Then you only have one site to worry about.

You should still be able to do the dev & testing on your site - just put it all in a different folder with no outside links to it, so only those working on it know how to get to it.