Quite a few years ago I signed up for a resellers account on JoneSolutions in the US. Over the year I used the WHM account to create a dozen or so accounts each with their own CPanel and WordPress install. The domain names are all registered with 1stDomains and each domain is set to use webhosts nameserver rather than 1stDomains DNS services. Any DNS changes (for those wanting to use Gmail or Exchange) were done in the clients CPanel.

I have no idea if that is "best practice" or not but it worked flawlessly until the web server died last month.

Rather than fix the dead server, JS decided to build a new one and assign a new IP. Fair enough I thought, their communication was good and everything was back up and running in a few days. There were some teething problems in the first couple of days and they needed to restore a couple of the accounts a second time but it all seemed to be ok on the new server and new IP address.

That was three weeks ago and at some point this weekend they have returned to the original IP address and here is where the problems start.

I had a call this morning to say when they tried to login to their site they kept getting errors. "Backend webserver unreachable", "405 Not Allowed" and "403 error". The page had a 10 second countdown, it refreshed and logged them in. Then they had issues updating plugins with "405 Not allowed" errors. If they tried again often the updates would work.

So I log a case with JS and take a look at a few things in the meantime.

https://www.whatsmydns.net has the correct webserver IP. https://intodns.com/ on the other hand is all over the place. The ns1 and ns2 records are IP's I've not seen before and the parent nameservers are returned as cluster1 and cluster2.blah. Again something I've not seen before. The parent nameservers also have no record of the nameservers I've used on 1stDomains.

I logged into their CPanel and all but a single MX record are gone. No A records for the webmail.blah domain or autoconfig.blah etc.

JS response has been that 1stDomains DNS has the nameserver pointing to an IP address which is years old and no longer applicable. But rather than explain what's changed (and the previous DNS records are all gone) they want access to 1stDomains to fix the problem.

So this is where there is a bigger hole in my knowledge than normal :)

Where do 1stDomains get the IP from with them just having the nameserver ? They say an IP address is not necessary, but should I give the IP of the nameserver anyway ? There is a directory somewhere obviously but am I right in thinking it shouldn't be a problem with the nameserver to change IP addresses ? People move accounts to new servers all the time.

So, did I have it set up correctly all those years ago ? Do you think I can remember exact what I did !!

How exactly should it be set up now ? Should 1stDomains handle all the DNS ?

I have other domains on 1stDomains who have Gmail email and their sites on Vultr so I know how to take care of that but I'm not sure how when the oldies still want to use JS for their email as they always have done.

I hope that makes some sense.