Setup up your own Domain Name and keep your emails.

Pointing your domain to different services such as web hosting, emails, ftp, marketing tools, etc. from different providers it can become a difficult task. Domain settings, and the whole DNS system can be very challenging to understand, even to software developers.

On this guide we will help you to make changes on your DNS to correctly point your domain to any website without losing your emails hosted in a different place, it is meant for Jumpseller stores but these rules can work anywhere in most cases.

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The problem

Some hosting services offer Emails and Websites in the same server, this can become a security issue: A problem on your website can trigger a problem with your emails cutting your main connections to your customers.

This is the reason why we recommend professional products that host your emails on dedicated servers such as Google gSuite and Zoho.

If you already have emails in a server that also used to host your previous website, and want to keep it while pointing your domain to a new website such as your new Jumpseller Store, this is what you need to do.

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Previous Steps: Gather Information

First thing to do is to be clear what are the required DNS to point your domain to your new Website, in the case of Jumpseller they are always the same, if your domain is example.com and your Jumpseller Store address is my-store.jumpseller.com, the most common configuration is to use www.example.com and example.com on your website:

Name	Type	Address
example.com	A	79.125.14.235
www.example.com	CNAME	my-store.jumpseller.com

Make sure you added the domain to your jumpseller store following these simple steps.

Next use a DNS Lookup tool to see what your current DNS records are, these are great:

• Who.is

• whatsmydns.net

We are interested in two DNS Records: MX Records and A record of the domain. For example lets use icann.com as a reference:

The results are placed on this table:

Name	Type	Address
icann.com	A	192.0.43.221
icann.com	MX	0:pechora.icann.org

Notice that the Address on the MX record has a subdomain pechora.icann.org preceded with a 0: (it can be any number), it can also have a domain. From here we can divide the tasks in two scenarios:

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Scenario 1: The MX record is different from the text of your domain.

Like in the example above: the text icann.com is different from pechora.icann.org. This is the easiest Scenario, just change your DNS to match the Jumpseller values, you should end with something like this:

Name	Type	Address
icann.com	A	79.125.14.235
www.icann.com	CNAME	my-store.jumpseller.com
icann.com	MX	0:pechora.icann.org

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Scenario 2: The MX record is the same as the text of your domain.

On our example with icann.com we had an ideal situation, but commonly you will find this:

Name	Type	Address
example.com	A	192.0.43.221
example.com	MX	0:example.com

On this scenario changing the A record to the value of your new website will break your emails, this is because of the problem described above. To prevent this you will create a secondary A record to redirect the emails to the current server, choose any word that is not currently present on your DNS, for example: secondary, redirect, old, etc. and create this A record:

Name	Type	Address
secondary.example.com	A	192.0.43.221

We are assuming that the IP of your email server is: 192.0.43.221

After this change, add the rest of the records to match the Jumpseller values, it should look like this:

Name	Type	Address
example.com	A	79.125.14.235
secondary.example.com	A	192.0.43.221
www.icann.com	CNAME	my-store.jumpseller.com
example.com	MX	0:secondary.example.com

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DNS Propagation and Cache

Finally wait for these DNS to propagate throughout the internet, this can take from 1 to 24 hours. The old DNS will be stored in cache on different levels, if after this period your domain does not reflect your changes try to flush your cache:

• On Windows - Open your command prompt or click Run when you open your start menu. Then, enter the following command: ipconfig /flushdns. If the command succeeds, you will receive the following message “Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache.”.

• On MacOS (Catalina) - Open Terminal (Application › Utilities › Terminal or click Go > Utilities > Terminal) Type sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder and press Enter to run the command.