Knowledgebase

The first thing you need to do is get you domain ready to send emails

Getting setup for #V2, and importantly why ‘we’ do it this way.

The first thing we need you to do is subdelegate a sub-domain to use with your #V2 installation. Even though I shouldn’t say it, no matter what email marketing software you want to use, there are some ‘email marketing rules’ we should embrace.

This is not the same as setting up an A record.

This article is to help you ‘Delegate’ your choice of sub-domain to use our nameservers.

If you already know about and how to ‘delegate a sub-domain’ click here for the NS records you need.

Q: What does sub-domain name delegation mean?

A: It means with one change you can let us set up all the technical DNS ‘stuff’ for your email marketing using our nameservers but ... your main domain is not controlled by us or directly affected by your email marketing.

Put another way, we don’t want the responsibility of having access to your main domain name DNS control panel.

While it is techie stuff and doing something wrong can ‘turn off temporarily’ a website, I believe all of our customers should know how to control the domain names in their care.

And besides, if you employ a semi trained outsourcer who thinks it’s a good idea to import a list of one bazillion email addresses, that his mate gave him, and then press send … on your behalf … I don’t want to turn your main domain off by mistake in my haste to protect you and me from being class as a spammer.

It’s just best for lots of reasons that you delegate the sub-domain you want to use, to us.

e.g. example.com might use the nameservers; ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com
.. while
subdomain.example.com would use different nameservers and the changes made to these nameservers never affect www.example.com :)

Q: Why do this?

A: There are a few important reasons;
It helps to protect your main domain from incorrect, misinformed or malicious complaints that can arise when doing your legitimate email marketing.

If we need to make major changes to our infrastructure, IP addresses or transit route we can do it it without having to bother you.

Providing you do your bit more of your contacts will see and interact with your emails.

Providing your main domain is not known for sending spam it gives you the capability to start building and developing high trust and email sending reputation for your sub-domain.

As your contacts list and your sub-domain sender reputation grows, there will come a time when your next logical step for your email marketing is to upgrade to dedicated server hardware with your own dedicated IP address. Or, to separate your ‘Transactional’ emails from your marketing emails. ‘Delegation’ makes that a smoother process.

Because you control the ‘nameserver delegation’ of your sub-domain(s) you could choose to set up with or move control to a different company, even one that uses different software (remember your sub-domain will build trust, based on your actions and that stays with the sub-domain, not the software). But I hope you’ll want to keep using #V2 software and upgrade to our dedicated servers that we manage for you (We can arrange transactional email services for you if needed).

Also when you do upgrade, it will be easier for us to get a new server set-up, configured, then back-up and move your system to its new home, and, you won’t need to worry about any impact to your main domain and website.

Q: OK ... but is it difficult for me to do this delegation stuff?
A: That depends on your experience and what you consider difficult but anyone should be able to do it.

Here are some simple instructions for you to follow. As I said previously, I believe you should know how to do it. Your capability and having the ability to have independence from us, and move if you choose in the future, is important to me.

Here is a link to an independent information source cited on the CPanel forums:
https://www.ndchost.com/wiki/cpanel/delegate-subdomain-to-different-nameserver

You will need to follow that process once for each of our nameservers.
The nameservers you need to input in to the box are:

ns0.thehostingshop.co.uk
ns1.thehostingshop.co.uk
ns2.thehostingshop.co.uk

It should look something like this:
‘example’ would be where you type in your chosen sub domain - you could type in a single letter like ‘a’ or ‘e’ or even words like ‘hi’.

Remember this subdomain is a visible part of your ‘brand’ and the #V2 power links use the subdomain in your messages.

We can not accept the sub-domain ‘mail’ and we recommend you avoid subdomain words like ‘marketing’, ‘track’, ‘promo’ etc

One quick tip. You can not set up sub-domain nameserver delegation from the CPanel DNS options, you must be logged in to and do it in WHM.

If you happen to use something other than WHM/CPanel and you know how to do it, please let me know what resource I can share with others who might be using the same DNS management facility or service as you.

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