DNS on GoDaddy, Email on Google Apps, Hosting on Mor.ph

We purchase all of our domain names on GoDaddy.com and host our DNS there as well. Our main domain, techcfl.com, had been hosted along with our corporate site on FatCow, when our site was written in PHP. We converted it to Rails some time ago along with giving it a major facelift. We also use Google Apps for email, team calendar, and team docs.

At RailsConf 2008 we partnered with Morph Labs (announcement coming soon), a “complete and fully managed hosting environment for Web applications.” Mor.ph’s hosting platform uses Amazon EC2, and your application can be easily scaled with a click of a button. Since partnering, we have moved our main site, the acts_as_conference site, and the Rails For All sites there. In doing so, we had to update our DNS, and during that process, we managed to take our email down for an entire week. So, after much troubleshooting, here’s the skinny on setting it all up.

Google Apps

If you are hosting email on Google Apps (for your domain) already, there is nothing more you need to do.

Mor.ph

When you sign up with Mor.ph and create a paid AppSpace Subscription, you have access to a domain redirection feature. To use it, you add each domain you want the site to answer to. Here’s how ours is set up:

*.techcfl.com
techcfl.com

This ensures that our site responds whether or not you use the “www” in the address. Personally I hate it when web sites crap out if you don’t add the “www,” so make sure yours doesn’t do that. Once you have that ready to go, stop and start your subscription.

GoDaddy

The GoDaddy configuration was the one that took the longest to figure out. After much ado (and perhaps a good dose of ignorance and refusal to call for support), I figured out that when setting the name servers to use, if you are going to use the GoDaddy DNS servers, but host your site elsewhere, you need to select the default parked nameservers. Next, create an ‘A’ record for your root domain, ‘techcfl.com’ in our case, and give it an IP of a Morph load balancer: 72.26.105.226. After that, create a CNAME record as follows:

Alias: www
Host name: yourapp.morphexchange.com
TTL: 1 hour

Substitute ‘yourapp’ with the Morph domain you selected when setting up your AppSpace. You can find it on the subscription settings page of your Morph subscription. In our case, we named ours ‘techcfl,’ so the host name we use is: ‘techcfl.morphexchange.com’.

Once you have those records set up, you want to configure you MX (mail server) records to use Google Apps if you haven’t already. Google has the skinny on that.