DNS stands for Domain Name System. Think of it as the phone book for the internet. Without it, you’d have to memorize a bunch of IP addresses to get to the website you’d like to visit. DNS essentially translates the IP addresses of the web, into names that are easier for humans to remember. Rather than get into the technical details of how the DNS works, I’ll point you to this extremely informative article by CloudFlare.
DNS records are vital to any small business who is launching, migrating or managing a website…
Here’s a list of the most important DNS records for small businesses and a brief, non-technical explanation of each:
Generally speaking, if you’ve just purchased a domain (example.com) and you haven’t changed the nameservers, the DNS is being managed by your registrar. The registrar is where you registered your domain. Some WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) website builders (think wix, squarespace, lodigfy, etc.) tell you to point your nameservers to them. From there, they handle all of your DNS for you, and more importantly might not give you access to it. This is fine for most people, but annoying for anyone who knows what they are doing. They also have a lot of limitations on what they are able to do, but we will cover that in a different post.
The easiest way to figure out where your DNS is setup, go to who.is, type in your domain and look at the name servers. From there, you can google those name servers and you’re likely to find out where to go. Example: nsxx.domaincontrol.com nameservers are through GoDaddy. dns1/2.registrar-servers.com are through namecheap.
There’s more than one way to cook an egg… BUT the most straight forward is to:
If you’re running WordPress, then you’ll add your domain with or without the subdomain (www) in your settings.
Another option is to do this:
Essentially, if someone types in www.example.com you’re telling the internet to look for example.com, and it will then reference the A record set in step 1.
Setting up your domain this way avoids having to go in and update DNS info if your hosting company ever moves your website to a new/different server (aka gives you a new/different IP address).To do this you must be using a DNS manager like CloudFlare – remember you cannot point a naked/root/bare domain to a CNAME. As of writing this, I don’t know of any registrars that offer CNAME flattening.
If you need help with DNS or have any questions, fill out our contact form and we will get back to you. Obviously, there’s a lot more to DNS than what is covered here but if we covered everything we would have to remove the “Basic” from our post.