Between a rock and a hrad place!

I have set up a web site for a local business whos domain name is hosted by their ISP who also look after their mail servers. The problem is that their ISPs hosting doesn't support PHP so they need to use our hosting. Should be simple I would have thought but no.

The ISP will only configure the A record and point to the IP Address but our hosting has advised this could cause the following problems:

Not changing the nameservers to ours will lead to technical complications such as subdomains not working, possible FTP issues (depending on the exact FTP host used), web site not working (depending on the exact web address used) and other configuration settings (depending on how you enable things on the site). Also, if you have the settings they propose, you will not receive any email from your web site (such as forms) as the server will believe the email should be delivered to it.

and suggested the following solution:

***** will be able to login to their OpenSRS account to change the nameservers to ours (this is possible as we have an "idling" OpenSRS reseller account ourselves) and then login to your cpanel control panel to change the "MX" record to their mail server. This should pose absolutely no technical issues whatsoever.

The ISP have come back and said that our hosting companies comments are technically unsound.

I don't have the knowledge to know what the truth is but our hosting company have always been very reliable and helpfull and really have nothing to gain by giving us the wrong information.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Becky

there is nothing technically unsound about having the webserver at one location and having the mail routed to another server via the MX record. That's how it's done. If you had a large company and were running a mail server like microsoft exchange server, that's exxactly how the mail is routed to the mail server while allowing the website to function independently.

I'm assuming you're providing something like c-panel, which would setup a zone on that server's name server also.

They would need to update their DNS records at their ISP's name servers if they add subdomain hosts / etc, your resolvers would not be queried to answer for them.

It is also critical that your hosting server does not use its own local name server to resolve external domains.

There is no technical issue other than the breakdown and ease of c-panel automation to provide hosting. You're not going to get them to stop using their ISP's DNS servers, but you can host them

Just make sure they know additional steps will be needed for using subdomains. Add on domains could be easily accomplished if they pointed the add on's to your name servers.

We get lots of requests like this too, mostly for a bare bones linux VPS / Apache server.

HTH
Tim

Thank you both! It's all sorted now.