Forum Moderators: phranque
I am setting up a new website for a minor public sector organisation in the uk. The domain name they want to use is a new .gov.uk type and the overseeing IT department will retain control of the domain name (they have setup mail servers and the like for the organisation).
Due to the nature of the content management system we plan to use on the new website their associated IT department will not host the site on their servers because of "security reasons".
So the IT department suggested that I find a suitable commercial hosting provider and they would "update our DNS server so the example.gov.uk domain points to the IP of the hosting server."
Now the organisation have an existing hosting contract with hosting provider and they have asked me if they can use this one to host their new site. I have looked at the documentation related to the hosting provider and I have found out the following:
1. They do not offer a dedicated IP
2. They do allow you to keep your current registrar and host a website on that domain. They instruct you to get your registrar to update their name servers to point to the hosting providers name servers
Should it be possible for the IT department to set up the domain name pointing as described above? Or will it cause them some problems.
I intend to ask them about this tomorrow morning (Monday 19/09/2005) but I would like to know as much as I can before discussing it.
Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Michael.
After a bit of testing with the IT department we managed to get the domain setup correctly. At least I hope so.
I went through the process of registering and external domain with the hosting provider. At the end of the process I was instructed to, "Point your domain name to hostingproviders domain name servers" and I was given two name servers to set:
NameServer - ns01.hostingprovider.co.uk
NameServer - ns02.hostingprovider.co.uk
The IT department I was dealing with were not prepared to change the name server settings.
So we first tried to point the .gov.uk domain to the IP address of the first name server provided by the hosting provider. That didn't work.
Next I pinged the hosting server using the existing domain name the organisation already have setup and noted the IP address. We then pointed the .gov.uk domain to that IP address and it worked!
My only worry is could the hosting provider change the IP address in the future? Thus screwing things up. Could this happen?
Michael.