I know nothing about A Records and Cnames except that I guess they're used to point url's in different directions so let me explain.
I'm a web developer and I have a new customer whose current site is hosted by their ISP. I'm assuming they provide maybe their phone service, their internet service and their in-house network.
I advised the customer to get a regular hosting account with a "hosting company" because the current host did not support SSI, had an old version of PHP, poor statistics tracking, no webmail, etc. It just wasn't a full-featured hosting account.
The customer mentioned that they had their own server (I assumed for local network), but I didn't think that moving the web site to a regular hosting company would affect anything. I would change the dns info at godaddy and all would be fine.
I received a phone call from their computer consultant asking all of the why's for wanting the login info for godaddy and for moving the hosting. After explaining "all of the why's" he reluctantly mentioned that he could change the A Record or Cname (whatever) to point to this other hosting account.
My question is, why would the domain name have anything to do with a server they have for their local network? Is it possible that the same server is used for both the local network and the www?
The only things I've ever had to do regarding domain names was to change the nameservers with the registrar.
Can someone educate me a little so I can better respond to these issues?
I want to make sure that there aren't a bunch of funky redirects going on that could negatively affect search engine optimization.
Thanks!
by changing the domain nameservers you automatically change all of the domain settings to the new server
by changing A records the only thing you do is point the web address to the new server (i.e. their isp still controls the email and may be their web access depending on how it's configured).
If all you want to do is have their website hosted on a new server (and not play with email etc..), I would call the it dept that installed everything and ask them to create (or change) the A records for ftp.domainname.com, www.domainame.com and domainname.com
That helps a lot. I didn't really want to redo 50 email addresses anyway. I hope that's their reasoning for it.
Thanks again!
ginger
