Changing WinHost hosted domains to point to Office 365’s name servers

Posted: (EET/GMT+2)

 

Today I needed to migrate a WinHost-hosted domain to Office 365. In my situation, I wanted to keep the web site services in WinHost, but move the email (and Lync, etc.) to Office 365. I've done this transition several times, but want to blog about the progress, because finding how to change the nameservers to point to Microsoft's name servers is not obvious, and secondly, is not well-documented.

Overall, if you have purchased a domain through WinHost and have used their mail and website hosting, then you use WinHost's control panel to modify all aspects of the domain configuration, including the nameservers (one to three) and the DNS records. Office 365 requires (for Lync) SRV records to be created, which you cannot create using WinHosts otherwise nice DNS manager. Thus, you often want to move your DNS servers to Microsoft for everything in Office 365 to run smoothly. You can still point back to your WinHost web site by adding a custom A record in Office 365's DNS management.

The process of migrating to Office365 from WinHost goes along these lines:

  1. Prove (verify) to Office 365 that you own your domain by adding a custom TXT records in WinHost’s DNS manager.
  2. Proceed with Office 365’s domain change wizard, and select that you want to host your DNS on Microsoft’s servers.
  3. Go to your WinHost domain management, and select that you want to edit the WhoIs information. This is where you set the DNS nameservers to point to Microsoft. By default, they are ns1.winhost.com, ns2.winhost.com and ns3.winhost.com, but you need to change these to ns1.bdm.microsoftonline.com and ns2.bdm.microsoftonline.com. The nameserver settings are at the bottom of the WhoIs editing page.
  4. Go back to Office 365’s admin pages, and find the DNS settings for your domain. Add an A record that points to your original web server. You can see the original IP address from WinHost’s DNS manager. Note that to get both “domain.com” and “www.domain.com” to work, you need two A records added to Office 365.
  5. Wait a while, perhaps 15 to 60 minutes, and all should be fine. Verify that your email and web site works, and you are done!

There's a good document on the Office 365 support pages titled "Change nameservers to Office 365", but this document doesn't list WinHost as an option.

Hope this helps!

Keywords: WinHost.com, change nameserver, set WinHost nameserver to Microsoft Office 365 Business