Using third-party services to strengthen your web hosting
Change some things on your web host
At this point in the tutorial you have outsourced both your DNS and your Email hosting, however your original web server still thinks it is controlling this stuff. (and technically, until we get to the next page, it is!) We need to set a few things straight here on the home turf so things don’t get messy later.
If you are on a shared hosting plan, you have to ask your support team to make these changes. If you have a reseller account, a VPS, or are otherwise in control of your own server you can do this stuff yourself.
Update the local DNS zone
Your web host server will have a set of DNS records in place for your domain. At the moment, these are the official records available to the public, but we will soon be changing that to the DNS host we have just set up. Right now, we need to change this copy of the records to match what we did on page two.
Since the website is staying just where it is, the only thing we need to modify here is the email MX records. You need to remove any existing MX records and add these seven records…
Host/Server: aspmx.l.google.com. Priority/Level: 10
Host/Server: alt1.aspmx.l.google.com. Priority/Level: 20
Host/Server: alt2.aspmx.l.google.com. Priority/Level: 20
Host/Server: aspmx2.googlemail.com. Priority/Level: 30
Host/Server: aspmx3.googlemail.com. Priority/Level: 20
Host/Server: aspmx4.googlemail.com. Priority/Level: 20
Host/Server: aspmx5.googlemail.com. Priority/Level: 20
Also in this web host copy of the DNS zone you must change the Nameserver records. Right now they are set to point to this web server, but in a moment we’ll be changing them to point to the new DNS server. Again, we’ll make these changes while we’re in the neighbourhood.
Remove all existing NS records for the domain, and replace them with the following. If you’re using DNSedit.net…
free01.editdns.net
free02.editdns.net
or if you’re using DNSMadeEasy.com…
ns10.dnsmadeeasy.com
ns11.dnsmadeeasy.com
ns12.dnsmadeeasy.com
ns13.dnsmadeeasy.com
ns14.dnsmadeeasy.com
ns15.dnsmadeeasy.com
As I mentioned, the easy way is just to ask your hosting support people to make these changes. Once this is done and saved new email will start landing in your Google Apps inbox. But that won’t happen instantly. Any changes to DNS take time to spread across the internet. It may start to happen within 5 minutes, but it will take at least 24 hours to have global affect.
Just one thing left to do…
You’ve almost made it. The only thing left to do is hop to the final page and change your domain registration info.
