Can anyone tell me about email addresses tied to a domain on a shared hosting account. When the site/server is down are emails dead too? Or is that handled through a separate server? Maybe it depends on the specific host and their infrastructure, I don't know. But am asking if anyone knows the general answer to this???
There is actually no general answer for this and all depends on the set up of the web host in question. But from my experience, most would pack the web, dns, mail and ftp servers on the same server for ease of management. Well, generally if the server hardware goes down, everything would go down with it too. Of course if you have control over your DNS Records then you can get hosting for your mails on another web host and point the relevant dns entry there.
Oh, how does one do that? All I've ever seen is when I point a domain to where its hosted the host gives me 2 DNS addresses like ns1.domain.com & ns2.domain.com. What would be a DNS just for email?
You pretty much answered that question yourself.. It really depends on how things are set up... It could go either way. Many of the cPanel enabled server tend to have both site and mail on the same servers.... Our wholesale division at HostDrive has a separate server for email specifically, so mail is up if site is down... either way, if the entire network is down, do keep in mind neither will work. However, when it comes to email there is something called an MX record which can be used to specify an alternate server to send/receive on, when the main one is down. This helps insure that mail is not lost... Having multiple mail exchangers is not really necessary though given the default retry for email is usually 3 days.. So mail destined for you does not bounce or go bye bye, it just waits on the sending server and retries over and over again until your server comes back up.
Aha! good to know. I have a client who is a Lawyer, and was worried about putting them onto my reseller hosting account as everyone at the firm uses domain email address. I was getting paranoid about packing them onto a shared hosting account. Or well onto mine at least. So with the 3 day bounce thingy there should be no problems and they are not likely to miss critical emails.
I also think most hosts run all the services for each account together on each server. There are many services doing different jobs... such as, web, ftp, mail, mysql, etc., and each one can fail alone. So if it is just something like Apache that crashes... your mail will still work. But if the whole server crashes... chances are that nothing will be working.
If you are using the DNS records from the web host than most likely you will not have much control over the MX records which identify where emails go to. However the good news is that many popular Domain Name Registrar do provide the free use of their DNS Servers which allows you to configure the entries in your DNS Records which means you can change the MX records to reflect the separate web host. You will however need to find out what IP address your sites are hosted on, it does not matter if it is sharing an IP or you have a dedicated one, it would all work. The only trouble with this set up is that if your web host move your site to another server, there would inevitably be a change of IP address which you need to update manually. However with all that said and done, if you are using the Cpanel control panel and if your web host enable the 'MX Entry' in Cpanel, you can change this to point to a separate site while using your web host DNS Servers. There are 3 core components of the MX Entry. MX means Mail Exchange Domain name - Priority - Full Qualifying Domain Name of the mail server An example would be yoursite.com. - 10 - mail.newhost.com. This means all mails for 'yoursite.com' would be redirected to the mail server 'mail.newhost.com'. The 10 is the priority, if there is only one mail server specify then the priority is there for the sake of formality. If you have more than 1 mail server than it would determine which mail server gets top priority, the smaller the number the top of the list it gets. If the top one fails, it will try to send to the second and so on. Not important to know that now.
One thing to keep in mind that is a con to having more than one mail server/mx... More spam, actually, it is easier for spammer to get through filters since they will tend to attack the other MX's, and since the primary trusts it's secondaries, you'll find a lot more spam slipping through the cracks... We did away with our back mail server some time ago as a result.