Last Updated on November 21, 2019
You will have to read the subtitles for the following video but it goes into a little more detail on how domain names work.
Domain is the website address (example.com). In addition to needing a domain name a business will also need a place where the website can be hosted.
Within the domain account you set what server is in control of the website by changing the DNS records. The following tabs will explain more about DNS records.
DNS (Domain Name System) entries take a human friendly name, such as store.example.com, and translates it to an IP address. DNS can be quickly updated with some propagation time. There are a number of DNS Entries you are able to create. The following DNS Entries can be created or modified from within the DNS Zone Editor.
- A Record
- CNAME
- MX Entry
- TXT Record
- SRV Record
- AAAA Record
- DNS Glossary
Check out this link to learn more about each of these different records
Particularly you will want to understand A, Cname, and MX Records
And don’t forget there is also “nameservers” which set who has control of the DNS records. For example, you can have the domain registered with GoDaddy but have the nameservers pointing to WebFaction and now to update DNS records you would have to change them within WebFaction.
GoDaddy nameservers have “domaincontrol” in their address. WebFaction nameservers are “ns1.webfaction.com, ns2…, ns3…, ns4…”.
You can use who.is to find out where various records are pointing to. This is very useful in tracking down where a domain is registered as well as who is hosting the website and can even tell you who is hosting the emails for the domain.
The following video will show you how to update DNS records inside of GoDaddy. The process will be very similar to other DNS registrars.
If you change a domain’s nameservers, you are changing who is in control of all of the various DNS records. There are benefits to changing nameservers. For example, when a server/host is hosting your website you normally would change the A record to be the IP address of the server but if the hosting company ever migrates servers on you then the IP address will change as well and if that happens you would then have to update the DNS records to prevent the website from going down. If the name servers were pointing to that host then they should automatically update those settings for you. WebFaction will occasionally do just this which is why it is sometimes best to change the Nameservers to point to WebFaction. Just remember that if you change the Nameservers you will need to update all of the DNS records inside of WebFaction to preserve the other records such as email, and CNAME.