Transfer Domain settings from hosting to own server

Question

At my workplace, we have a pretty messed up setup for our website, say domain.com, that was earlier hosted with another company, say hostingCompany1

At hostingCompany1, there are 2 control panels:

1. Domain (has the domain.com, points to some IP)
2. Hosting (points domain.com and subdomains to our server, has Gmail MX records)

We are using our own server with the settings still at the second control panel.

Which means, when someone visits our site, it resolves to:

domain.com > hostingCompany1 DNS > hostingCompany1 Hosting > Our Server

This is a pretty messed up scenario and I would like to clean it up to be more like:

domain.com > hostingCompany2 DNS > Our Server

1. When I finally transfer domain.com from hostingCompany1 to hostingCompany2, how do I achieve the above scenario (i.e., remove the middle man)?
   
   
2. Do the domain settings (MX) have to be on hostingCompany2 or our custom server?

Answer 1

One way to do this would be create child nameservers (e.g., ns1.domain.com and ns2.domain.com) pointing to the IP address of your custom server. You usually do this at your domain registrar.

Then create A records for ns1. and ns2. pointing to the same IP address and add that to the hostingcompany1 DNS.

Then, of course, you change your domain.com nameservers to point to ns1.domain.com and ns2.domain.com.