Host website on UNIX, but email on Windows?

Question

Client has web hosting and email hosting from one web provider.

Their email hosting is integrated with their systems for their office — an Exchange server (located on their premises).

Both are on a Windows server (the same one, TBC — security problem?), but this web host does not support PHP, a problem for:

• WordPress on a subdirectory
• PHP contact form scripts
• PHP includes

Nor does it support .htaccess — a problem for things that I have built into the site:

• Redirects/404
• Various other enhancements

Client has agreed to move the website over to either a UNIX server with the same web host, or I can also suggest another (cheaper/better) one.

The email can remain hosted on the Windows server (as I understand Exchange will not work on Apache).

Will it be possible to seamlessly and easily do this? Likely by changing A/CNAME/NS/MX settings for the domain?

Answer 1

Email hosting is easy to separate out from web hosting using DNS. In that case, you would point the MX records to the email host, and the records for the main domain name and www to the web host.

So what should you do?

In your case, you should be able to separate out the web hosting from the email by changing just the A record for the main domain to a new IP address of the UNIX host. In this case, you'd leave the MX records alone.