You do not need to move your website to ZIPROF to use ZIPROF's professional email hosting for your domain. Email and website hosting are handled by separate DNS records, so you can leave your website exactly where it is and simply point the record that controls mail delivery, the MX record, to ZIPROF's mail servers.
What You Need Before You Start
- An active ZIPROF professional email hosting account, with your mailboxes already created.
- Access to wherever your domain's DNS is currently managed. This could be your ZIPROF control panel, or the control panel of wherever the domain was originally registered if it wasn't registered through ZIPROF.
- The exact mail server hostname, priority value, and SPF value ZIPROF provided when your email hosting was set up.
If you're not sure where your domain's DNS is currently managed, check with whoever set up your website. Making DNS changes in the wrong place won't affect your live domain at all.
What Changes and What Doesn't
Only the records related to mail delivery need to change: the MX record, and usually an SPF TXT record so outgoing mail isn't flagged as spam. The record pointing your domain to your website's server, typically an A record or CNAME record, stays untouched. Your visitors will keep reaching your existing website without any interruption while you make these changes.
Step 1: Remove or Replace Any Existing MX Records
A domain can only receive mail through one email provider at a time. If your domain is currently using a different email service, its existing MX records need to be removed or replaced, not left in place alongside the new ones. Running two sets of MX records at once causes mail delivery to become unpredictable.
Step 2: Update Your DNS Records
In cPanel
- Log in to cPanel and open Zone Editor under the Domains section.
- Find your domain in the list and click Manage.
- Delete any existing MX record that points elsewhere, then click Add Record and choose MX Record.
- Enter the mail server hostname ZIPROF gave you and set the Priority value provided, then save.
- If ZIPROF also gave you an SPF value, add or update the TXT Record for it the same way, replacing any conflicting SPF entry rather than adding a second one.
In DirectAdmin
- Log in to DirectAdmin and open DNS Management.
- Select the domain you want to update from the list.
- Remove any MX record pointing to a different mail service, then add a new one using the hostname and priority ZIPROF provided.
- Update the TXT record for SPF in the same way, then click Save.
If your domain's DNS is managed somewhere other than cPanel or DirectAdmin, such as wherever you originally registered it, make the same changes there instead. Look for a section called "DNS Zone Editor," "DNS Management," or "Advanced DNS."
Step 3: Wait for the Change to Take Effect
DNS changes are not instant. Mail servers around the world need to pick up the new MX record before email starts arriving at its new destination, which usually happens within a few hours but can take up to 24 to 48 hours in some cases. During this window, some incoming mail may still reach your old email provider.
Step 4: Confirm It's Working
- Send a test email to one of your new ZIPROF mailboxes from an external address, such as a personal Gmail account.
- Reply from the ZIPROF mailbox and confirm it arrives back at the external address.
- Log in to webmail to confirm mail is landing in the correct inbox.
If mail still isn't arriving after 48 hours, double-check that the old MX records were fully removed and not just deprioritized, since a lingering old record is the most common cause of delivery going to the wrong place.
Your website's hosting is unaffected by any of this. If you decide later to move your website to ZIPROF as well, that's a separate process handled through your domain's A record rather than its MX records.