Hosting email & web for domain on separate cpanel accounts

Question

We're currently transitioning our web site & email infrastructure from a single shared hosting account onto a new linux VPS, which we manage using WHM and cpanel.

There are two big chunks we need to move off our old host, onto our new VPS:

1) We have a number of @ourdomain.com email addresses. We would like to move them to our VPS, and have managed as their own cpanel account, which would handle email and nothing else.

2) We also have a ourdomain.com web site. We would also like to move this to our VPS, and have it managed as a separate cpanel account, which would handle web access and nothing else.

That way, if we hire a web contractor to tweak our web site, they won't be able to also poke around in our email, because the two will be held on completely separate accounts. Someone could be given access to the cpanel account for the web site, without also getting access to the cpanel account that handled our email.

However, I haven't been able to find a way to do this without hosting both email and web content on the ourdomain.com cpanel account on our VPS. If I create an "email.ourdomain.com" cpanel account, it can only manage email accounts for [email protected], and not [email protected]; if I create a "web.ourdomain.com" account, our web site would be located at "web.ourdomain.com" and not just "ourdomain.com".

Is there a way to host email and web content for the same domain name on different cpanel accounts within the same VPS?

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

Sorry to say that to my knowledge this is only possible if you have two separate VPS with different IP addresses. As far as I know it is not possible to create two accounts in WHM with the same exact domain, but this is possible on two separate VPS because then you can point the DNS records for email to one VPS and the records for the www (website) to another.

But I must say, if your email accounts have passwords, anyone accessing the cpanel for the domain must either know the password or update it to a new one to be able to read the emails. If they update an email account password to a new one to 'snoop' around I don't think you should continue working with them.

Answer 2

Host your @ourdomain.com email on one cpanel account (let's call this cpanel #1) where the DNS points to for the domain name, and then setup an A record within cpanel #1 to point to the IP address used in cpanel #2.

This way you can keep your email and web content on separate cpanel accounts, and your web visitors and email contacts won't know.