Hi Everyone!

I have been hosting my websites on a Debian LAMP system at home for a number of years. But power- and network outtages have now made me look for an alternative. I did host some sites on shared hosting providers, but performance there is terrible. Linode looks pretty cool to me and so I'm planning on signing up for an Linode account and rebuilding my home server on a linode and also move my other two websites from my shared hosting to my Linode.

Now there's something I was wondering about. I'm quite the noob when it comes to dns, a-records, mx-record and such so please excuses me if this is a dumb question.

The thing is that for now, I don't want to be bothered with configuring and hosting my email myself. So what I want to do is keep the email at my current shared webhost (Lunarpages). These guys do a great job of hosting my email for as far as I can tell, and it only cost a couple of dollars per month.

But -and here is the question- would it be possible (in my registrars dns control panel) to point my domain name records such that web traffic goes to my Linode and email goes to Lunarpages? My domains are all registered by GoDaddy.

Thanks for any light on this subject!

Yes, you can do it. Along with A records for each of your web servers, make an A record (not a CNAME) for the mail server. Then you just need an MX record for each of your domains, pointing to the mail server.

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/ Peter

Actually, I don't think you even need to duplicate the A records for the mail servers; just have the MX record for your domain(s) point to the actual lunarpages mailserver names.

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The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world.
-- seen on the net

SteveG is right; you should just be able to use the MX record.

One thing to be careful of is the trailing period. Say your domain is mydomain.com. Here are the following options for setting the MX record:

mailserver.lunarhost.com. -> this will point to mailserver.lunarhost.com

mailserver.lunarhost.com -> this will point to mailserver.lunarhost.com.mydomain.com

Obviously only one is what you want!

Thanks for the replies so far, guys.

Unfortunately I just noticed that godaddy doesn't have a DNS control panel. Well at least it's not included in the domain registry price. I can only point to a custom name server but that's it.

I noticed in the Linode features list that they offer:
# Managed/hosted DNS service with slave support

Is that the kind of DNS control with which I can split my web and email traffic to different destinations?

Yep.

Snipped from http://www.linode.com/features.cfm:

GoDaddy actually does, but it's kind of hidden. If you want, I could go into how to find it but I'll instead recommend Linode's DNS Manager since I've found it to be much more reliable.

Cool, thanks all! Now I know that it can be and even how it's done!
I will be ordering my Linode pretty soon. Especially with this community behind it, I think it will be well worth the money. Now all I need to decide on is Debian vs Ubuntu Server, but that's a whole different subject and one that's probably already covered elsewhere!