Our company wants to transfer the domains from an Hostmysite provider to Azure without downtime.
Could you recommend to me the best way to do it?
Best effort answer, but I will avoid the part "without downtime" because that is subjective what acceptable downtime is, how much must be "moved", how tidy you are, etc.
A short recipe would be something like:
On azure, in your Azure subscription, create an "DNS zone" resource.
Rebuild the content, manually or by scripting.
You can test the dns by shell or even redirecting your workstation to use this dns. You find the ns addresses in your Azure DNS resource.
When ready, delegate your domain to the new DNS.
Delegation of DNS zones with Azure DNS, "nearby" articles can also be useful.
Everything, up to 4) is harmless and has almost no cost. So you can do several attempts and use your time. The last task 4), your current DNS provider can help you with.
Let me talk a little about downtime. Example of a bad scenario, you forgot something important like MX records. Can't help you there, you are on your own. But let us say that everything is set up correctly, then it will be almost no downtime. It will take some time before every dns in the world has discovered the change, but it doesn't matter much because the old dns and the new dns, says exactly the same.
Related
I was attempting to do something else and obviously did not know that the "Delegate to Azure DNS Zone" would break my site. Because after I clicked the button, my site no longer can be displayed. I immediately removed this but it is still unable to be displayed. Can anyone fill me in on what I need to do to make this work again? Happy to provide more information just not sure what else you may need to help. I purchased the domain through Azure about a year ago.
If I understand correctly, you bought the domain one year ago and your domain is hosted by GoDaddy(your domain registrar, where you bought domain through Azure portal). It means requests to your site is resolved by name servers provided by GoDaddy after then.
When you use "Delegate to Azure DNS", those name servers will be replaced by ones provided by Azure. (If you didn't do any similar settings except clicking one button, that means operations are finished through one click.)
So your site is lost for the moment due to the change of name servers. As #juunas said, DNS propagation may take some time(Up to 48h but usually faster).
You may also need to check, whether your DNS record in DNS Zones and your Hostname bindings are changed or removed by the delegation operation.
Hope it helps.
If the problem can't be solved, you can show us:
Where is the button on your site
How do you remove this settings
DNS records and hostname bindings
For our SaaS app, we're allowing customers to point their domain name to our server.
The plan right now is to simply hand out one of our AWS elastic IP addresses for them to point their domain to. The elastic IP address would essentially be pointed to a EC2 instance web-server...and maybe a load balancer in time (if traffic demands it!).
The user would specify what their domain is in our app, and we'd be able to resolve the host name coming in as their app.
My concern is the longevity of this solution. This IP cannot change. And we'll certainly be tied to AWS if we go this route.
(Note: Being a 1-2 person startup, standing up a data-center is more than likely no-go, and we hope to use AWS or Azure).
What solutions would make this IP address -> SaaS Web Server concept last in the long run, with flexibility, and as minor of a tie as possible to a cloud provider?
With running the risk of asking "what is the best way to do this"...what's the best way to do this, keeping in mind longevity and small opt-in to a cloud provider?
You can't point an IP address to a load balancer, so this seems like a very bad idea. You need your own domain/subdomain that clients can point their domains/subdomains to via a CNAME record on their end. Then if the location of your service ever changes you just have to update your domain record and their DNS records will continue to be correct.
We're thinking of changing our web hosting plan mode from Shared to Standard but are not sure what will happen with the dns registrations I've set up for my sites. Would a move result in a new ip-adress forcing me into changing all my dns-registrations?
If you are using a custom domain (e.g. www.yourdomain.com) and pointing that via a cname to the actual Azure url (e.g. yourproject.azurewebsites.net) then you shouldn't need to change your dns. If you are pointing to an IP then you may have to change your dns.
Really depends on how you have setup your dns currently, could you elaborate on the records you have?
There is a good article on the Azure help area discussing this very topic:
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-custom-domain-name/
Check out the 'CNAME or Alias record' section in particular.
Use CNAME records instead. That way you don't have to worry about it.
If I want, I could buy a new domain and point to something.azurewebsites.net. No Registrar imposes a barrier here...
My question is:
will it work? or the owner of something.azurewebsites.net has to explicitally do some configuration?
What if I point to the current IP (or the now possible, fixed IP) of something.azurewebsites.net?
Details:
I don't own a domain neither want to buy one just for testing this, or i would...
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-custom-domain-name/ should answer your question. In short, yes, the owner of something.azurewebsites.net has to setup a verification entry in the Azure management portal.
We frequently take over the domain names of our clients when we take over the management of their site. Normally the transfer progress goes fine. However sometimes we have issues with DNS settings during the transfer progress as the transfer involves moving the DNS records to our registrars nameservers.
It seems to be that the outgoing registrar is deleting the DNS info from their nameservers before we have a chance to manage the domain through our registrar and setup the DNS info on our registrar's nameservers. This obviously leads to a few hours (potentially a couple of days) of downtime for users.
I am wondering if anyone else ever has this problem and if there is a way to avoid it. Is there some kind of a guideline for how long the outgoing registrars needs to keep the DNS info on their nameservers? Or how should we manage this process to never have this downtime occur. As I said this only happens sometimes - and it alawys seems to be with with .com/.net/.org domains but not with .uk domains (we are a UK based company).
We are having the same problem with a .com domain. It only seems to happen when you have domain and hosting in the old provider together in the same pack and when trasferring the domain the hosting is also turned down along with all DNS records. Not all providers behave that way.
I would get a new hosting and change DNS in the whois before ordering the domain transfer, being sure that the new hosting is working.
In our case the old registrar didn't allow us change the whois, so we took the chance and it failed. Once the mess is done, I suppose we can only wait.