As a rusult of the incompetence of my ISP shown in
this thread who also provide all our domain registration, web hosting and stuff, I want to move from them.
There are some issues, particularly in how I can control where and when stuff is being sent, and make changes to those settings myself rather than relying on anybody else to do it.
The webhosting side is probably the easiest bit. Most web hosts now provide Cpanel and stuff enabling me to get at whatever controls I need.
Where and how can I get control (direct ownership) of my domains, so that I can decide where the tags are being pointed?
Chances are I will have two separate ADSL connections into the office and will want to be able to swap between the two if one dies.
I have a particular issue on email. Our incoming email should come to us as a SMTP feed, which is then sorted by our Exchange Server to end up on individual inboxes. It's not like email the average user has to their outlook express where the computer sends out messages for an email account at a time. Effectively anything for @domaion.co.uk just gets shovelled at us. Sending email goes back through the ISPs SMTP server.
Do I have to have an ISPs SMTP server to send stuff back to? or can I just upload to the internet? If so who's DNS servers do we point stuff at?
If I have my websites hosted somewhere can I still get an SMTP feed.
Can I control the fixed IP that that email is being sent to and change it swiftly myself if I get a problem?