123Reg and changing A Record : Do you need to change www A Record and @ A Record?

Draeger · 21 Jan 2012 at 20:21

Have a domain registered with 123 Reg and want to host a static XHTML website on my shared server hosting with another company. However, I want to leave the email going through 123 Reg. So rather than just change name servers I believe I just need to change the A Record to point to my shared server IP?. Thing is, in the 123 Reg control panel there are two A Record settings, one is "www" and the other is "@".

Do I need to change both of them to my server IP or just the www one bearing in mind all I want to do is host the website and nothing else?. As far as I know the 123 Reg CP looks like the @ Record doesn't affect the MX Records in any way but after some Googling it appears that some registrars say differently.

I'm having a slight email issue which will take a bit of explaining in a subsequent post but if someone more knowledgeable than me can clear up the above question I can further elaborate.

Cheers.

markeh · 21 Jan 2012 at 20:26

What I do is point the @ record to the IP address of the server, then point the www record to your domain as a cname record.

I've done this a few fair time and never had an issue. If you want to be safe you can point both www and @ to your IP address and it will be fine.

None of this should affect your MX records.

Draeger · 21 Jan 2012 at 20:35

I thought it would be fine as well m8 and not affect the MX records or email but I'm having an issue with it. Could you explain what you mean by "point the www record to your domain as a cname record"?. Here's what I have got in there just now, the IP addy you can see is that of my shared server hosting :-

The problem I'm getting is that if I attempt to send an email the domain on 123 Reg from any domain that I have registered and hosted with my shared server hosting provider, I'm getting an error message thrown up which says :-

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

[email protected] ( I've not posted the actual email address here, obviously )
No Such User Here

No idea what the issue is as the email address in question that I'm trying to send to is definitely there. I have emailed it from 4 other email accounts ( O2, Yahoo, Gmail and AOL ) and it works fine. It is only when I attempt to email from a hosted account on my server to the domain that I've changed the A Records for on 123 Reg that it gives me this error.

Also, if I log into the email address I'm trying to send to via a third party webmail service such as Mail2Web, and attempt to send an email to any hosted domain of mine it gives me this message :-

Error : Error in sending message
An error was reported in response to a recipient address. The SMTP server may refuse to handle mail for unknown recipients.

Worth pointing out that before I changed the A Records earlier I could send and receive email to the address on 123Reg with no issues at all. I'm stumped and a bit concerned as to how I fix this.

Would it have anything to do with propagation time?. I only made the A Record changes this afternoon. Does it usually take the full 24-48 hours to pan itself out properly or are the issues I am describing above something else?.

m4rkw7 · 21 Jan 2012 at 23:25

Point your domain to the place where you want it hosting (everything), then from there point the MX records to the place you want them.

Draeger · 22 Jan 2012 at 07:13

m4rkw7 said:
Point your domain to the place where you want it hosting (everything), then from there point the MX records to the place you want them.

Thanks, I'll keep that as an option. However just changing the A record on 123 Reg and leaving the MX records well alone should have worked, can't understand why it hasn't. Unfortunately there's no facility for me on my own host to change the MX records, I need to contact support and get them to do that so I thought the first way would have been slightly less hassle.

Bit of an update - If I open up something like Mail2Web and log into my EUK hosted email address and attempt to email the 123 Reg hosted email address, it will send fine. The issue then arises at the other end if you then try and reply to that sent email ( reply from the 123 Reg email address ) wherupon it will throw up as posted previously, the error :-

Error : Error in sending message
An error was reported in response to a recipient address. The SMTP server may refuse to handle mail for unknown recipients.

webfusion · 23 Jan 2012 at 09:44

Hello,

My name is Nerys and I work for 123-Reg.

If you wish to point your domain name to a third party hosting, whilst using 123-Reg for emails, the correct way to do this would indeed be to point your domain name to your hosting IP address via your A records, you will need to point both the @ and www record. The @ A record will not effect the MX records. Only if you are setting a CNAME as an @ record would this cause an issue with the MX records.

If you are still experiencing issues with your emails, please provide me some further details and I can have this looked into for you. I would need to have a domain name, username or a support ticket ID. If you could provide one of these I can look into this for you.

Alternatively you can raise a ticket through the 123-Reg support site and one of our support team can look into this further for you.

Regards,

Nerys.

Draeger · 23 Jan 2012 at 09:49

Hi Nerys, many thanks for the reply, this issue has been fixed now. Apologies, should have followed it up and posted back to that effect.

I did indeed have the correct settings in the 123 Reg control panel, the issue cropping up with the email was because I needed to have my own web host change a setting for me. For anyone with similar problems in the future, what happens when you change the A Record of a domain with another registrant so it points to your server IP and add an addon domain for that domain from cPanel is that cPanel by default, drops the addon domain into the local domains file. It needs to go into the remote domains file though as the domain needs to use an external server for emails ( in my case anyway, as I only wanted to host the website and not the email accounts ). In most cases ( and mine ) this needs to be done by your web host support as they need to configure the settings on your behalf.