Moving to a New Host That Doesn’t Support Google Apps

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With Dreamhost, it was so easy to opt for a Google Apps hosted email Inbox over the self-hosted one. All I had to do was select that option and set it all up. I don’t remember having any problems with it when I moved from Philhosting to Dreamhost. But moving Badodong.Com from Dreamhost to Fatcow left the boyfriend without access to his Inbox for over a week.

I kept going back to my DreamHost panel checking the settings for the domain name – it seemed to still be pointing to Google and it was selected as the email provider. What was wrong then? Eventually, I realized that having changed nameservers to that of Fatcow’s most likely messed things up. I was right! It was NOT cool that there was no one click option within FC’s Control Panel to host your mail with GA, but chat support said there was a way so I kept at it.

The chat support people at Fatcow gave me direction for changing custom DNS records and I was able to setup the right MX records for my chosen Inbox. Yet mail.badodong.com was resolving to Fatcow’s default webmail service. My next mistake was adding Google’s MX record as the destination address for the subdomain. I asked FatCow chat support again if I had done things correctly and they kept saying yes! But nothing was working.

I wasn’t getting anything more from Google Apps support, and Fatcow support wasn’t much help either. I compared my settings from my old host and realized that the Fatcow panel didn’t give me an option to add or modify the CNAME. So, what I did instead was point the subdomain “mail” to ghs.google.com. And what do you know? That did it!

With that mystery solved, I should be able to move the rest of my blogs to their new home. The only question is, when would I have the time to do it?