Domain Hosting and changing domain

Our network consist of about 125 workstations, servers and printers. Our
current domain name is abc.internal. We currently have our public domain
hosted but want to bring it in house. This will involve changing the domain
name to abc.com. How hard is this? We are operating on Server 2003 so it can
be done but I'm very concerned about doing so. Also, once this is
accomplished how do we go about hosting our own domain? Can we even change to
abc. com before we redirect all traffic to our web server? Right now our web
host redirects traffic to an ip address but the DNS points to our host. Can
someone explain the process of having this accomplished????

I'm not sure you are required to change your internal domain name to host
your website internally. Your DNS host (typically your domain registrar or
Web host) currently points www.abc.com to your Web host. If you host email
internally, your DNS host is also pointing mail.abc.com to your local
Internet connection IP address. Once your internal website is ready, you can
simply change the address of www.abc.com at your DNS host from your current
Web host to your local Internet connection IP address. If your Web host is
your DNS host, you rent your domain name from them, and you want to
terminate your account with them after hosting your own website, then you
might have to move your DNS host to a domain registrar.

If you do decide to change your local domain name, I would suggest not
changing it to abc.com, but instead to something like internal.abc.com. This
would allow for easier changes in the future should you change your mind
about hosting your website internally. Basically, I sugest leaving abc.com
in the cloud for maximum flexibility. You can still host your own services.

Hope this helps!

Greg0145 <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> Our network consist of about 125 workstations, servers and printers.
> Our current domain name is abc.internal. We currently have our public
> domain hosted

Hi - what kind of hosting? It's important to be clear....webhosting? DNS

> but want to bring it in house.

If this is webhosting - I strongly discourage this ... unless you are
setting up an isolated DMZ and are not allowing any HTTP traffic onto your
LAN at all. There should be no connectivity between DMZ-->LAN (although the
reverse is generally safe, depending on the ports). IHosting accounts are
generally quite inexpensive, and hosting companies have large datacenters
with redundant everything-you-can-think-of. Your own network is unlikely to
offer this sort of thing - and it's generally best to leave it be.

If this is DNS - do not do this unless you've got the infrastructure to
support it. This means two dedicated DNS servers not on your LAN (see DMZ
comment above) - ideally these should not be on the same subnet, even
(meaning, more than one circuit/ISP). And also heed the "redundant
everything" comment re the

> This will involve
> changing the domain name to abc.com.

No - your AD domain has no bearing on this. And regardless, it's generally
recommended that it not share the same name anyway (and that has nothing to
do with hosting). abc.internal is a perfectly fine AD domain name. You can't
change your domain name under many circumstances anyway.

Forgive me, but based on the questions you've asked & the assumption you've
made, it would seem that you don't have a clear enough understanding of how
all this works (DNS & AD) for you to undertake this task even if your
network were already set up to allow it.

> How hard is this? We are
> operating on Server 2003 so it can be done but I'm very concerned
> about doing so. Also, once this is accomplished how do we go about
> hosting our own domain?

Again, see above.

> Can we even change to abc. com before we
> redirect all traffic to our web server? Right now our web host
> redirects traffic to an ip address but the DNS points to our host.
> Can someone explain the process of having this accomplished????


Not any better than I have above, sorry. If you were to attempt what you're
describing now for DNS, you'd blow up your AD something awful as well as
open up some huge security holes & render your public domain resources
likely inaccessible. That's not a good thing