The glue that holds it all together

DNS is what connects the domain to services accessed in different ways. Each service, e.g. website, mail, etc has a different connection protocol, and the DNS settings are the controller of these connections. DNS is a goofy concept at first and most clients don’t fully understand any of it. They will look to us to be their guide.

The Domain Name

This is that .com/.org/.net, etc. This is something that is bought, usually yearly or multi-year. A domain registrar is the seller and manager of this process.

Common domain registrars

• Godaddy
• Namecheap
• Hover
• Network Solutions
• Google
• 1 and 1
• And many many more under the term ‘Resellers’, often powered by one of the above behind the scenes.

NameServers

This is a root setting that identifies where the DNS is managed. This is most often the same as the registrar, but not always the same name verbatim. Godaddy’s nameservers are usually ‘domaincontrol.com’ and Google uses a ‘googledns.com’ as theirs. This is mainly to help manage their own traffic differently than their marketing or business operations, but also adds a layer of redundancy so that their support sites can be accessed if there is a larger issue at hand.

We recommend CloudFlare for all DNS management. Not only does this provide high-speed access, but they supply great tools to protect the site from bad traffic. They can not only thwart attacks, but the admin can change the mode to ‘under-attack’ to increase security sensitivity.

Nameservers are usually a pair of records. e.g. ivan.cloudflare.com and sarah.cloudflare.com.

Looking up current Nameserver settings.

Using the NS lookup tools, we can see what the current nameservers are set to. This can also guide us to where the DNS may be managed, as many clients don’t remember.

DNS record types

If Nameservers are the managers of the DNS, the next thing to know is the DNS records. Here is where the magic actually happens. DNS records control access and routing.

Types of DNS records.

• A record These are very primary. Our hosting needs will need an A record. This is the domain, pointed to an IP address directly.
• CNAME Think of this as a redirect or an alias. Some hosts use this to map the domain to their proper server account. We often use a CNAME to match the WWW to the non-WWW version of the domain.
• MX record We rarely need to manage this, but the MX is a mail record. It’s how a domain would be leveraging google business email or Outlook.
• TXT records These are entries in a DNS that are used for many things, but most often for validation. For an outside service to send an email on behalf of a domain, there must be a text record that tells the world that it’s allowed to. Services like SendGrid, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, etc will all have their own unique TXT records that will need to be added to the DNS.

Time To Live (TTL)

All DNS records have a time delay on their deployment. This is more or less a legacy thing from when the internet was new in the 80s and 90s. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) would cache a table of records, and because these tools were slow, they would want to know how often to check for new changes.

This is still honored today and is often used as a security measure. Changes to DNS records are not instant and if there was a mistake, in theory, there would be time to remedy that based on the last set TTL.

TTL is a time value, in seconds. So a TTL of 600, is 10 minutes. All DNS managers have different minimum values here. Most are 300 or 600 seconds as the lowest, some are 1800, or 30min.

Setting this to the lowest value is the fastest way to see new records go live, but some ISPs will still take time.

The time between the TTL

The time between your changes, and seeing the changes can be a game of IP caching, ISP roulette, and mixed viewing experiences. One user may see the new site, while others experience the old. It’s best to not try to make any changes or expect the recent changes to be fully live till the TTL has fully passed. Even then, it can still be fuzzy as the TTL is a request, and not all ISPs respond instantly to that, or there is DNS caching for users that frequently access the site (e.g. the client).