Moving hosting to Netlify, keeping email at Sonic

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by twriter » Mon Oct 26, 2020 10:05 pm
I have had Personal Web Hosting along with my Sonic account for ages; it hosts a small personal website with registered domain, one that I've not updated for awhile. I also grabbed my name some years back using the .name TLD, but that's becoming a pain, so I'm just going to drop it. My plan is to migrate the latter to Netlify so I can practice CI/CD processes, but use the registered domain that's currently for my site that Sonic hosts. I still want Sonic to manage the domain and email, though, because Netlify doesn't do the latter.

I've backed up my files to my local computer (eventually I'll add them to the stuff hosted on Netlify as an "old" historical subdirectory), and my Netlify instance is ready to go, but I'm not sure what DNS records I need to modify to point anyone going to the domain to the Netlify instance. I have:
  • SOA
  • NS (3 of them)
  • A
  • MX (2 of them, 1 SPF and 1 DMARC, and I know these are for email, so I wouldn't touch them)
  • TXT (2 of them)
  • CNAME (2 of them)
I'm pretty sure the MX records are for email and I don't want to touch them. But I'm not sure what ones I should change, or how.

Note that the Netlify instance has a default Netlify subdomain in the form of https://[sitename].netlify.app, so I can actually go to that URL and see my website.

I've been doing my own searching and the various documentation I've found doesn't give me the confidence to forge ahead on my own, so I'm here asking for guidance.

Thanks!
by joemuller » Wed Oct 28, 2020 1:02 pm
Hi,

If you're just transferring the Domain Registration and already have hosting with Sonic, you just need to make sure the Authoritative Nameservers listed at your new registrar still list Sonic's servers, which are:

a.auth-ns.sonic.net
b.auth-ns.sonic.net
c.auth-ns.sonic.net

For just keeping email hosted at Sonic (MX Handling), you'll want to make sure the MX records point at the following servers:

mailin-01.mx.sonic.net
mailin-02.mx.sonic.net

In addition, if you have an SPF record, you should include Sonic's allowed IP's by making sure the following is included before the '-all' (or '~all'):

include:mail.sonic.net

The easiest way to safely switch from Value Hosting w/ DNS to just MX Handling is to use the Modify Hosting option in Member Tools to change your site to 'DNS-only', then send an email to support@sonic.net requesting a downgrade to MX Handling for your domain.

-- Joe M
Sonic System Operations
I'm a proud employee of Sonic.net! :-)
by cyclos » Tue Dec 14, 2021 6:02 pm
I am in the same situation as twriter.

I have about 40 aliases for domain email addresses pointing to my sonic email account. If I change my Value Hosting to DNS-only, can I still have domain email aliases?

Is there a limit on the number of aliases?
by cyclos » Sun Dec 19, 2021 5:25 pm
In case others are interested in this, I repeated this question to Sonic support and got this answer:
To answer your first question if you switch to DNS-only you still get access to MX handling which is what is required to have domain email aliases. As for the second question there is no practical limit for the amount of domain email aliases that we know of. So you should still be able to create more domain email aliases without worry.
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