Migrating just hosting (not e-mail or domain registration) from GoDaddy to DreamHost

Question

I am attempting to migrate my domain hosting from GoDaddy to another service, as GoDaddy's servers seem to be painfully slow when handling interactive forms, PHP applications, WordPress, etc, even though uploading and downloading files to/from the server is fast. My guess is not enough CPU time available on the servers.

So, I have a site, eg: test.com, which is completely handled by GoDaddy (e-mail, hosting, domain name registration), and I would like to just migrate the hosting to DreamHost.

So, my plan is to go to my DreamHost account, update the MX records to point to GoDaddy's mail stores, and nothing else, ie:

        A   173.236.158.140
        MX  0 mailstore1.secureserver.net.
        MX  0 smtp.secureserver.net.
        NS  ns1.dreamhost.com.
        NS  ns2.dreamhost.com.
        NS  ns3.dreamhost.com.
ftp     A   173.236.158.140
mysql   A   208.97.161.29
ssh     A   173.236.158.140
www     A   173.236.158.140

Then, I create a mirror domain on DreamHost so that I can upload my files to the server foo.dreamhosters.com.

Finally, when the site looks good, I will go into the GoDaddy control panel, and update the NS records to point to those provided by DreamHost (ie: ns1.dreamhost.com, etc).

Does this sound like the right approach? My current e-mail address, [email protected] receives a lot of important e-mails, and I want to both minimize downtime and avoid missing important e-mails.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Does this sound like the right approach?

No, it doesn't. When you say you want to move your hosting, I'm assuming you mean the website. If so, simply change the A record(s) for the website to point to the ip address of the new web server. There's no need to do anything with the MX record or the NS records.