Setting up Netlify and ImprovMX on Namecheap DNS

2023-06-18 – #Backend #HowTo

I’m hosting this site on Netlify, my domain service is namecheap and I’m happy with these choices so far.

I cheap out on all this stuff and go for the free version because I’m a poor student 🎓🏫

If you search for how to setup Netlify on a namecheap domain, you will come across doing it like this:

Figure 1. The easy way to setup namecheap with netlify

And so I did that too but what I now want is to use another service with a good free tier: improvMX. It should allow me to at least receive emails on a …@drexhage.me address.

The issue is that if you go for "Custom DNS" and type in other peoples DNS servers, then you won’t have the option to further customize other DNS records anymore. To fix that you can choose "Namecheap BasicDNS" in this dropout menu instead. Then in the "Advanced DNS" tab, you can customize all DNS records to your liking.

To host my website and use the email forwarder on the same domain, I went with this DNS records setup:

Table 1. All DNS records I currently use
Record type	Host	Value	Priority
A Record	@	104.198.14.52	-
CNAME Record	www	<whatever>.netlify.app.	-
TXT Record	@	v=spf1 include:spf.improvmx.com ~all	-
MX Record	@	mx1.improvmx.com.	10
MX Record	@	mx2.improvmx.com.	20

The first two records are for Netlify: They are stating where to look for the information when hitting the site.
The last three are for improvMX:
- The MX (Mail Exchanger) specify which server should receive/accept the incoming emails. In this case, it should go to the improvMX servers.
- The TXT record is actually a SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record that states which domains are authorized to send emails from my domain. Sending emails costs money with improvMX so I don’t send emails from this domain, but the record was needed by improvMX for the setup.

Double checking

dig is a cool tool to check DNS records. You can check whether the changes you did to your DNS are already applied.

$ dig drexhage.me MX +short
10 mx1.improvmx.com.
20 mx2.improvmx.com.
$ dig drexhage.me A +short
104.198.14.52