A client wants to keep their email at BlueHost and their website at MODxCloud. I know the ins and out of DNS Made Easy for websites, but I’m overwhelmed by ALL of the DNS entries at BlueHost and can’t make heads or tails.
When I add the client’s domain to DNS Made Easy I have 24 hours to get the all of the Mail related records perfecto. Has anyone else ever done this before? Any helpful tips out there?
Peter,
aka UltraSEF
Welcome to the community Peter / @UltraSEF!
Firstly, these shared hosts like to add records for every little thing, I doubt the customer even knows what 90% of them are. For example:
Just curious, are you able to manage your DNS settings via your domain host, like Google allows you to? If so, I would think you could get away with splitting the records that way.
Hello Peter,
As you are a little unsure about the control panel can I suggest one precaution that might reduce the amount of stress you feel when making the changes! (What I am about to discuss seems to be covered on the DNS Made Easy website, so you may well have taken this precaution already).
When making changes to DNS it can be a good precaution to redice the TTL to a fairly low figure. This means that if you make a mistake in your configuration it will become apparent more quickly, which enables you to fix it and get the fix propagated more quickly.
Say your TTL is currently set to 86400 (24 hours). If you make an incorrect change to the DNS settings some DNS servers will pick up on that change. You might not become aware of the error until it has propageted around the internet over the next 24 hours. Even if you are aware and you correct the error within a few minutes, DNS server might not check back and pick up on the correction for 24 hours. So you can be in a mess for up to 48 hours.
24 hours or more before making the change, set your TTL to be a much lower figure. Some hosting companies limit you to fairly high numbers, but if you can, try setting it to about 5 minutes (300). Then when you edit your DNS you should see if things are going wrong within 5 minutes and be able to sort it out, or revert back to the previous settings within the following five minutes.
Don’t forget to set the TTL back to a higher figure once everything is working OK.
I hope it goes well.