Scattered

There has already been a long debate about hosting your own DNS servers and mail servers but I’ve found once again relying on Godaddy total DNS management and using GoDaddy e-mail forwarding has made my three migrations over the last year a breeze. So I suggest to everyone:

Suggestion One:

Don’t mix your host and your registrar. You might not see your domain again.

For anyone looking to create their own site I urge you, never register your domain with your host. There are too many hosts out there that are priced well and say they have great service but when you find yourself needing to move the domain that they registered for you will tie you down.

This is probably the only suggestion I can give to the majority since the next two are more for the VPS or dedicated server owners.

Suggestion Two:

If you’re planning to run a VPS or Dedicated box don’t roll your own DNS.

There are tons of pros for running your own DNS but when compared to using GoDaddy total DNS they’re few and far between. Especially the reliability and ease for future migrations. First, you wont have to worry about long TTLs on those name-servers when planning to move. You should be able to count on your registrar’s DNS reliability, security and ease of use as well.

I found running DNS on my current VPS hogs ram, and every MB counts on most VPS plans, in this case 40MB to 50MB is a lot.

When migrating all you would need to do is update your records at the registrar in my case GD, I didn’t have to worry about saving configurations, preparing to lower TTLs on the nameservers and A records and then configuring the server on the new machine. Granted that might not take very long but waiting for IPs to propagate is horrible.

I’m also preventing the worst case scenario, which has happened to me recently; having to move hosts without any preparation because your server completely down waiting and you find yourself wanting to move. In that case if I had my own DNS server I would have to spend the time getting the original server up in order to get the root servers the new IP, instead I just opened a new account at a host I wanted and changed the A record at GD and I was back up and running in 20 minutes with a TTL of 30 minutes. Again, waiting for the root servers to find you at your new home can take a day (or two) and then you’re just lost to the world.

And that’s not including the wait for MX records, essentially pausing all of your mail if you’re running you’re own main server too.

Suggestion Three:

Don’t run your own mail-server if your on your own VPS or Dedicated if you can help it.

This is a big one for me because if your server ever goes down or is down because of a migration you will not receive mail for that time period. The message will hang waiting for your server to come back up and will be eventually delivered but if you’re down for an extended period (maybe because of not going with the suggestions above) the result may be a bounced e-mail back to the sender. The perfect solution I’ve found is forwarding all mail through GD forwarding to my gmail accounts, for my main account I actually use Google apps which GD handles the MX records for me.

Overall:
I’ll admit relying on GoDaddy or any other registrar to provide that quality uptime for your DNS and Mail might be harder then relying on your own server; in my case it’s not, since I’ll admit to downtime and not wanting to worry about two more services running on my machine.

In my experience not relying on your own server or even your host will make your life a lot simpler day to day and that day you’re back up against a wall and you want to migrate to a different server, whether you hate your current host or you want to upgrade.

I’ll need to throw my 20 minute migration steps into another post and I’d also like to recommend (mt) dv plans without plesk (& installing webmin).