ftp.clientdomain.com necessary when DNS managed outside cPanel?

[markus909]

Situation: web developer that now wants to offer also hosting to clients. I have a small reseller account with WHM and cPanel for this.

I do not manage the DNS records with cPanel. The domain often lies with the client. Most often that means also that nameserver and domain records are managed there.

I noticed when I set up an account for FTP it tells me the FTP server ftp.clientdomain.com
However, that A record ftp does not exist on the actual applied zone file. It does exist within cPanel, but the cPanel zone file is not applied when I use an external nameserver as the client is managing it there.

That is also valid for all other records like whm.clientdomain.com or cp.clientdomain.com

Question: Does it in any way make any difference if I just tell the client to use the server IP address instead of ftp.clientdomain.com to connect via FTP client?

 

[quietFinn]

Question: Does it in any way make any difference if I just tell the client to use the server IP address instead of ftp.clientdomain.com to connect via FTP client?

If ftp.clientdomain.com does not resolve to the server IP address then you must tell them to connect to server IP, or clientdomain.com.

 

[markus909]

I never questioned this before as I didn't run into it - but why does ftp.clientdomain.com even exist then, when it's not different at all to clientdomain.com

Just using clientdomain.com as the server address seems like a good idea (it should always work, less configuration necessary when the nameserver is not with cPanel)

 

[rbairwell]

"Historical/convention". Whilst mail.example.com , www.example.com , ftp.example.com , example.com *could* all point to the same server/setup, they don't actually have to - some people/organisations have a totally separate FTP/SSH server from their web server - I've got my email through GoogleMail etc, Because of these long standing conventions going back decades, quite a few people expect the ftp server to be on ftp.example.com and websites to start with www - and it's easier just to go along with it.

It'll probably be best, tbh, if they were to use SFTP to the server hostname as then the SSL certificate will be correct (SSH/FTP doesn't support the concept of "virtual hosts" like web servers do).

 

[markus909]

It'll probably be best, tbh, if they were to use SFTP to the server hostname as then the SSL certificate will be correct (SSH/FTP doesn't support the concept of "virtual hosts" like web servers do).

Thanks! Having some things separated and other things not, e.g. using different providers (domain registrar, nameserver, email) in general is the biggest challenge. I am trying to get some streamlined standard setup for my clients, but it's very difficult - e.g. one has nameserver on their registrar, others are able to use Cloudflare, others have no email and want email with me, etc.

Overall, the easiest way is to have it all on one platform - and it's also the solution I try to avoid (hence the pain to get the bigger picture).

It's a disadvantage not using cPanel as the nameserver, but then I also think most of the entries in the zone file are not necessarily needed (as I learned today, not even ftp.clientname.com is actually needed for most cases)