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Given a domain registered through DotRegistrar, with GoDaddy as the current host (shared hosting) I need to figure out how to move the hosting for the primary domain to another hosting provider (Force.com) but continue to use GoDaddy for email and for one or more subdomains to serve large media files that we can't store in Force.com.

Currently, we're using GoDaddy's DNS servers, but since GoDaddy is not the registrar, we can't access their domain management system, and can only add subdomains through the hosting control panel.

I think I kinda' know what to do, but I want to make sure I really get it before I start reconfiguring things! Any advice would be appreciated.

I think the steps are roughly...

  1. Switch the primary DNS servers for the domain from GoDaddy's to DotRegistrar's.
    (perform remaining steps in DotRegistrar's DNS management system)
  2. Add a CNAME record to set the canonical name of {our-domain}.com. to {our-domain}.force.com.
  3. Add MX records for smtp.secureserver.net (priority 0) and mailstore1.secureserver.net (priority 10) to match what GoDaddy previously had for us.
  4. Add an A record for each subdomain that should be hosted at GoDaddy, pointing to the same IP address that the top-level domain was pointed to before by the GoDaddy DNS.

Does this look right? Are there any gotchas I need to be aware of?

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You've covered things pretty well there, apart from the redirection of your domain.com address to force.com. According the the RFC's you should not use a CNAME for the root record of your domain, so what you should really be doing here is creating an A record for domain.com, that points to the IP of your hosting at force.com, and configure that to serve pages for that URL.

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Thanks for the advice. I guess that means the instructions for Force.com Sites hosting are in contradiction to the RFCs though, because that's where I was told to use CNAME. I assume that's because Sites is cloud-hosted, and there is no permanent, predictable IP address for the site server? – Steve Jorgensen Jan 26 '11 at 1:59
Perhaps, I should actually use a CNAME from www. instead of from the root, then (maybe that's what the Sites docs actually say -- I'll check), and host the Web site under www. ? In that case, I guess I could still point the root at GoDaddy with an A record, and use .htaccess on GoDaddy redirect root-domain URLs to www. URLs. Does that sound right? – Steve Jorgensen Jan 26 '11 at 2:13
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