Pointing domain to email and website

[hellarda]

Hi all,

I'm in the early stages of setting up a business and we are looking at different email/website hosting options.

Currently we are trailing O365 for email and google compute engine to host our website.

My question is how do we point the domain at O365 for email, and to GCE for our website?

Both services have different name servers to assign on their help pages. Not very savvy on this stuff yet so any help would be appreciated.

The domain is registered with 123-Reg if that makes a difference...

Cheers

 

[On Holiday]

 

[hellarda]

MX records to point to O365 and WWW records to point the website.
You shouldn't need to change nameservers, you can just use the 123-reg ones but amend the A / MX records as provided by the services (O365 and GCE)
You'll need to do TXT (SPF) and perhaps DKIM too but O365 should have a guide for this.

What I will ask is how come you want to use O365 and GCE? I can guess that both of these solutions combined are going to be more expensive than your typical webhosting which includes email at 123-reg for example? If this was an established business requiring scalability I could see the use case, but as it's a start-up then I don't see a need for anything more than your basic webhosting at a few quid a month?

Thanks for the quick response - I have found the O365 records I believe, under the domain and then under exchange online section there is an MX, TXT and CNAME record. I presume these are the correct ones.

I can't seem to find the records on GCE, I don't suppose you are familiar with the platform and know where to find them? My brief googling hasn't brought anything up.

We are just trialling different services at the moment. From a glance the 123 email options aren't much cheaper than the O365 offerings (£3.49/mo/usr vs £3.80/mo/usr) and the O365 offering also includes shared mailboxes amongst other team collaboration tools, which we are looking to use. We are still looking into hosting options, but we just set a GCE instance as it was quick, free and easy to do.

 

[On Holiday]

 

[hellarda]

Thats fair, just had a look at 123reg and they do look rather expensive!

I use Namecheap for all my domains and never had an issue, they're very well priced and are quite a big player so might be worth considering.
I host websites on my own server so cannot comment on their hosting unfortunately.

I'd always recommend having something cPanel-based as it makes it very easy to up and move providers in future and there's hundreds of helpful guides out there rather than relying on a providers own helpdesk/knowledgebase.
https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/shared.aspx

Not familiar with GCE I'm afraid - I didn't even know they do just web hosting, thought it was all virtual machines and you'd be required to install your own HTTP/Email services etc.

I will have a look at Namcheap - thanks for the recommendation!

I think you're right above GCE, it is just a VM instance, with an external IP, so presumably just need to map the domain to that IP within the 123 reg settings?

Another question if you don't mind... is there any advantage to the different name servers used? When you setup O365 or GCE it tells you to change the name servers to their ones, is there any advantage to this or is it better to leave them as the 123 reg defaults?

Again thanks for your replies - very helpful

 

[On Holiday]

 

[touch]

Another question if you don't mind... is there any advantage to the different name servers used? When you setup O365 or GCE it tells you to change the name servers to their ones, is there any advantage to this or is it better to leave them as the 123 reg defaults?

If you changed the nameservers to the O365 ones, it would be able to automatically set the email records that you need (MX,TXT,CNAME, etc) you'd still need to manually enter the details for your website host address (the A record).
That's not particularly difficult to do yourself though, so it wouldn't be a big advantage.