Can you migrate a CNAME when switching Marketing Automation platforms?

[kreischke]

Hi all!

I am working on a migration from Pardot to Marketo, and came across a question. 

Is it possible to migrate a CNAME from one instance to the other? so for example, if our CNAME in Pardot was go.company.com, can we use that same CNAME in our new Marketo instance? If possible, is it recommended? Are there any implications we need to consider?

Thank you!

[SanfordWhiteman]

First, note "the CNAME" is actually the name controlled by the MAP owner. That is, {accountstring}.marketo.com and {account}.pardot.com are CNAMEs.  go.example.com is an alias for the CNAME. In DNS, you create a CNAME record to point an alias to a CNAME. Many, many people get this terminology wrong — so just trying to get the right word out. The "C" in CNAME stands for "canonical," meaning authoritative/core/real/etc.

Anyway, no reason you can't do this, as long as you realize the alias can only point to one CNAME at a time when someone does a DNS lookup. You can lower the TTL (time-to-live) on the DNS record so people move from one server to the other as fast as possible. You can keep the migration time < 5m for 99.9% of cases, but there will be outliers who do override caching for a day or so, that's unavoidable.

An advantage, I would say, to keeping the same alias is that all your obsolete LPs will naturally become 404s and become removed from search results (assuming that's what you want), and updated LPs with the same page names will be reindexed (again, usually what you want).