Can I host my site in DigitalOcean and my Email on Godaddy?

Question

My client is currently hosting his site on a shared GoDaddy hosting plan, an also his emails accounts. Question is... how can I migrate his website to Digital Ocean and keep the emails on GoDaddy?

Answer 1

I had an recently where I could not receive emails on my goDaddy account once I have moved the nameservers to DO. For anyone facing this issue, the below steps should fix it.

To migrate hosting from goDaddy to DO, follow the below link

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-point-to-digitalocean-nameservers-from-common-domain-registrars

Once you have pointed nameserves, your traffic will be redirected to DO. Now if you want to use the email service provided by goDaddy, you will need to point your DO "MX" records back to godaddy.

First you will need to know the goDaddy incoming email server details. To obtain this, you will need to go to email server settings within your goDaddy Dashboard. The server details will look something like

Incoming server (IMAP): imap.secureserver.net

Incoming server (POP3): pop.secureserver.net

You will then need to add these details as MX Records in your Digital ocean domain DNS settings page. DO will then route emails to your goDaddy email service.

These details will take time to reflect. For me it took a day to start receiving emails on goDaddy.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

This is possible, recently I did the same with Hostgator and GCP ( Mail service from webmail and app in Google Cloud ). These are the steps I followed.

• 1) Add new A record ( if possible/allowed add with name @ ) in your
  shared/hosting/cpanel service, and point it to your cloud providers
  IP(the IP on which your app is running).

• 2) Add another A record with name www and point it to the IP of your service running in the cloud.

• 3) Delete the CNAME record called mail.
• 4)Add new A record with name mail and point it to your cpanel / webmail service providers IP.
• 5)Add MX record and point it to destination mail.yoursitename.tld and set the priority as 0

By this point, you will be able to send mail.

• 6) Add SPF record ( TXT record ) or go to Authentication settings in the Email section in your cpanel and enable SPF.

• 7)Go to Email Routing in the Email section in your cpanel and select your domain then choose Local Mail Exchanger under Configure Email Routing. That's it now you will be able to receive emails also.

Link to my original answer

Answer 3

Yes, you could just change your zone records to reflect what you want to do. Presumably you want to transfer the DNS zone to Digital Ocean and only keep the email at Godaddy.

1. In Godaddy's domain name manager you can change over to the Digital Ocean name servers.

   ns1.digitalocean.com ns2.digitalocean.com ns3.digitalocean.com

Check things out:

dig ns example.com  

and

whois example.com   

The name servers should be the above DO name servers.

The only thing you need to point back at Godaddy will be Goddady's MX records. unless, of course, you're using Office 365 email, which a lot of Godaddy's customers seem to use, in which case lookup the appropriate MX records for Office 365.

I hope this helps.