[ale] Preferred domain registrars?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 01/21/2010 07:45 AM, Geoffrey wrote:
> I'm using 1and1 and I will say, I'm looking to move.  Downloading email
> is slow, very slow.  I've got clients who complain about the webmail
> interface.

I try very hard not to "put all my eggs in a single basket", so to 
speak.  Those who I buy domains from, I do not use for DNS, for email 
services, for Web services, whatever.

My current setup looks something like this:

  * My registrar is GoDaddy. The only thing I do with them is domain
    names.
  * I run my own DNS.  A client of mine provides secondary DNS for my
    domain; likewise, I provide secondary DNS for my client's domain.
  * I run my own Web servers via my Internet connection. I was using
    NearlyFreeSpeech, but I wasn't able to do certain things there
    that I wanted to do with the Web sites that I was hosting there,
    so I moved them to my personal server. I would have used a VPS system
    but that was not (for what we do) a very economical choice.
  * I have Google Apps for Your Domain that handles my email, docs,
    calendaring, and so forth.  If you are allergic to Google services,
    then you can somewhat easily run your own mail server.  Not sure what
    you would do for calendaring, assuming that you even want it.  We
    use it pretty extensively so that we have all our time data shared.
    For some things, I have my machines running mail servers directly
    that do not go through Google.

> So, I'm looking for some insights.  Say I have a domain that has 20
> email addresses associated with it.  If I transfer the domain, won't
> those email addresses bounce until such time I set them up on the new
> server?  I am having 1and1 host the email and websites.

What you would want to do is not transfer it all at once.  First, 
transfer the email.  Set up the new email provider or your own new email 
servers, and then *test* *them*.  The easiest way to test them out is to 
talk to them directly, say, using telnet or netcat.  If that's not an 
option for you, though, you can set them up to handle a subdomain until 
you're satisfied that they're working, then update DNS to point to them 
for your email.

You can also test them out by promoting them in DNS to be the primary 
MX, and not have them forward mail to the current system.  Leave the 
current system as the secondary MX with a lower priority, and if the new 
system does not work, all you have to do is take the mail server offline 
and because your current solution is the secondary MX, the mail will go 
there after the failed attempt to send it to the primary MX.

> Further, how does one go about hosting on a different provider?  I'm
> assuming folks are registering one provider and hosting email and web on
> another?

Precisely.  There is no reason to use a domain registrar's services for 
email and Web hosting; IMHO, it's asking for trouble.  Of course, the 
registrar is a single point of failure; your entire domain will fail to 
function if it disappears from the Internet because of a problem at the 
registrar.  That said, you can also do something like have .com and .net 
and .org registered through different registrars if you need some level 
of redundancy.  Manual effort is required then in the event your primary 
name disappears temporarily, but that's better than not being able to 
get to things at all.

> I'm looking for insights here, so disregard my ignorance and enlighten me?

If you're anything like me, you will want to take the time to learn how 
domain registration and domain services work and depend to a degree on 
each other.  This isn't terribly difficult, most of it is published as 
standards or RFCs and available freely from the IETF.  They specify how 
mail clients look for what server to send mail to for a domain, for 
example, and how to find other things that a domain is running (Web 
servers, Jabber federation data, etc.).  Also, you'll want to be really 
familiar with DNS.

As far as DNS goes:  I run tinydns (djbdns).  I have a set of M4 macros 
and some helper C code that I use to build my djbdns configuration so 
that I don't have to think about the low-level details of the djbdns 
setup.  I am pretty well liking how the thing is setup.  If (any of you) 
want those, I think I have them up on my Web site.  If not, I can put 
them up there pretty quickly and easily.  Essentially, instead of typing:

:fennel.trausch.us:28:\040\001\004\160\037\021\000\077\002\003\177\377\376\216\217\350:600
^8.e.f.8.e.8.e.f.f.f.f.7.3.0.2.0.f.3.0.0.1.1.f.1.0.7.4.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa:fennel.trausch.us:600

I type:

DD_AAAA_PTR_FULL(fennel, 2001:470:1f11:3f:203:7fff:fe8e:8fe8)

And that handles it for me.  (The helper C code does the reading of the 
IPv6 address to convert it into various formats because I couldn't 
figure out how to do that with M4.  I suppose I could have used 
something like Python or whatever, but I was happy using C99 to do it, 
and so I did.)

	--- mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch - mike at trausch.us
Tel: (404) 592-5746 x1