DNS: Untangling the Confusion

One of the first thing people have to deal with when signing up for web hosting is registering a domain and setting it up. I've seen terribly intelligent people get frustrated to the point of inaction when dealing with this, so if you're confused you're not alone.

This page should help you understand what DNS is, what you need to do about it, and (believe it or not) a lot about how the system works. Things are simplified a bit for clarity, but the essential information is right here.

Quick work-around: if you just want to get your site up and running and don't want to mess with all this stuff, just register your domain in your control panel, or use the control panel DNS tool to transfer your domain from your current registrar to ours (eNom). Once you do this, our system will automatically make everything work the way it needs to.

DNS: What it is

DNS is to domain names and ip addresses as the White Pages is to people's names and phone numbers. We'll approach it by talking about the White Pages first.

Every phone in the world has a unique telephone number. You can talk to anyone in the world if you know their number -- just dial it and you're done. The problem is that people have problems memorizing a bunch of nine digit numbers -- we do better with names like Bob Smith.

When you want to call Bob Smith you probably haven't already memorized his number, so you open the phone book and look him up. When you find his number is 012-345-6789 you dial that, he picks up the phone, and you go on with life. It's simple, it works, and you don't think much about it.

The world is too big to maintain a single book that lists everyone's phone number, so we've got a distributed system. If you want to call Bob Smith in Detroit, you look in a Detroit phone book. In DNS terminology, the Detroit phone book would be the authoritative phone book for Bob Smith. You might call Directory Assistance in Ogeechee Florida to find Bob Smith's number, but what they do is refer to the authoritative data in Detroit and pass that information on to you.

DNS mostly works the same way:

Every web host has its own set of name servers that are authoritative for the domains they host (just like the Detroit phone book is the authoritative list of phone numbers in the Detroit areas) -- all you need to do is tell your web host the name of the domain you're hosting, and they handle listing it in their own DNS servers which become authoritative for your domain.
There are a set of root nameservers that don't contain any data on individual hosts; rather, they maintain a list of authoritative domain servers.
When someone wants to look up the ip address if your domain (like looking up the phone number for a person), they tell their local DNS server (think directory assistance) who they're trying to find. That nameserver checks the root nameservers to see which DNS is authoritative for the domain you're trying to find, then it queries that domain to get the address, then returns that to you.

This seems confusing, but the confusion is about to disappear. Here's the way it works in practice:

You open your web browser and type in www.hotmail.com.
Your browser tells your computer to find the ip address for Hotmail, since computers deal with addresses rather than domain names.
Your computer asks the local DNS server if it happens to know the ip address of Hotmail. If it's been looked up recently (generally within the last 24 hours) then it returns the address it remembers. If not, then it queries the root nameservers to find out which DNS server has accurate information on Hotmail's address.
It then queries the authoritative nameserver, gets the address, and passes it back. (Technically there are multiple sub-steps involved, but this is all you really need to understand about it).
Your computer gets the address-to-domain mapping, and saves it locally. Now, when you try to get to Hotmail your computer can avoid the whole DNS lookup mess. At least, it can do so until it thinks the data is too old, and rechecks it to make sure.

That's all DNS is -- a distributed way of maintaining domain name to ip address mappings.

DNS - what you need to do to set it up

If you register a new domain from your control panel, then everything's automated. If you registered your domain name at another domain registrar, then you can tell your control panel that you'll be hosting the domain and the local DNS will be set up automatically. But before someone can get to your site, you'll have to find a way to get your local DNS server listed with the root domain servers as the authoritative servers for your new domain.

All you need to do is go to your domain registrar and tell it that our domain servers (generally ns.wellbuiltnetworks.net ns2.wellbuiltnetworks.net and ns3.wellbuiltnetworks.net) are authoritative. Your registrar will make sure that the root nameservers are updated.

That's not all though: now you need to wait

The problem here is that your local DNS is now configured properly, and the root nameservers are set up to point to our servers, but you're not going to be able to get here yet. The reason is that name servers cache their data to reduce the load on the DNS systems, so your local DNS server won't recheck the ip address of your domain until its current data is marked as too old to be trustworthy (assume 12 hours on average, but it really depends -- this is why your reistrar said it can take 48 hours to propagate -- in a worst case situation, it really will take a while).

Until all the DNS servers have received the news that your domain has moved, people trying to get to your domain will be directed to where it used to be. In the case of domain parking, they'll still go to the domain parking notice rather than your new site. In the case of a server that's being moved, they'll either see the old site (if you're still paying for hosting on it and have the host configured to handle that domain) or they'll get a message that the server can't be reached for some reason (if you've turned off hosting for that domain with your old host).

Summary of the steps you need to take:

If you're signing up for a new domain through your control panel:

If you're moving a domain from your current registrar to ours in order to host here:

Tell the DNS tool in your control panel you'd like to transfer the domain.
Wait for the new data to propagate.

If you're going to register the domain at a domain registrar:

Register your domain at your registrar.
In the DNS tool in your control panel, tell it you're hosting a domain you've registered elsewhere. You'll get a notice telling you to perform the next step.
Tell your domain registrar to use our domain servers.
Wait for propagation.

That's it. Now everyone can find your site.

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