DNS Records for Newbies - How To Manage Website Records

in today's video I want to talk about everything that you need to know about DNS records for managing websites and domains this is going to be a purely practical look at DNS records so whether you are a web designer or IT person or anyone who has anything to do with managing a website or domains this video is for you since it's a purely practical approach I don't want to talk about any of the technical minutia or details about that I just want to talk specifically about what you need to know the important things about managing DNS records so you can better manage your domains and your website's I ran a web design agency for many years and in that time I built and launched over 200 websites for my clients now with each of those 200 websites means 200 different domains with 200 different configurations and so I've seen most anything that you could expect to see when it comes to DNS record configurations and so today I want to help you navigate DNS records knowing everything that you need to know from a practical standpoint so you can better manage your websites and your clients websites Oh before I forget there is a really informative companion piece article to this video that you should check out link I'm sharing here and also in the description it's at AFRICOM slash blog it's an article all about everything you need to know about DNS records so check that out also so today what are we going to talk about well we're gonna be talking about name servers which are the records that control everything we're also gonna be talking specifically about different types of DNS records from the records that affect your website to email related records and all the other important ones in between we're gonna talk about what records you need to know about what the most and what they're most common settings are so you can have an idea of if someone's telling you their email is set up with Gmail or Google suite we're office 365 you'll know what the typical setup is for those we're also going to be talking about big issues that you may run into and how you can avoid them so like for example how you can avoid taking down someone's email or their website yeah I want to help you avoid all of that we're going to talk about different DNS providers as well as different tools to help you manage all of this some that you may not be familiar with but they're they're a bunch of free tools that can really help you and make your life a lot easier and we're going to cover that all coming up shortly so starting out what is DNS what are DNS records well put simply for every website domain you own there are different DNS records that help people navigate knowing where a website is knowing where the email is hosted basically everything related to that domain is that information is contained in the DNS records and it basically points people in the right direction you know put put simply DNS records point emails to the right email servers it points people looking for the website for the domain to the right web servers and so on there are different categories of DNS records and we're going to touch upon the important ones here but they range from mail records to website records to other records informational records and we're gonna touch on kind of all the important ones coming up shortly typically there are a few components to each record and now I just want to show you real quick just an example of a DNS record and this is using one of my favorite tools it is called MX toolbox com it is a lookup tool that helps you find different DNS records related to a domain so if I didn't know for example what my or clients mail records were I could look them up and this way I can ensure that if I'm bringing a site live of theirs I know what their records are and I in case I don't want to change anything or lose anything I can make sure to note all of this so the first record that I want to talk about today is the NS record which is short for a name server when you're thinking about DNS records it all starts with the name server record because this is where all your DNS records will live the name server is where DNS records are all stored if you want to change any specific entries like your website related records or your email server related records you have to do it at the website where your name servers are pointing to and where you have an account there so for example typically if you buy a domain wherever you buy the domain they will usually host the name servers at their website for you and you can keep it there you can keep your name service there so like if you buy a domain with GoDaddy you will typically see that your name servers are pointing to GoDaddy and in your GoDaddy admin console you'll be able to change your different DNS records your website records your mail records and all that but if you don't want GoDaddy or whoever you registered your domain with hosting your name server records you can change those and there are typically the name server records are two lines it's like usually NS one or NS two dot your website that's the name server com typically like for example GoDaddy's common set up is named NS something dot domain control.com name server records for cloud player which is my preferred DNS provider is like a name dot NS CloudFlare com there are a bunch of different ones there are always a minimum of to name server records sometimes rarely there are more than two name server records rarely I don't think I've ever seen actually less than two name server records so typically you'll see two name server records and it'll look something like what I've shown you on this screen here by the way just quick shout out to this tool MX toolbox com if you are ever trying to look up different domain related records for your domain if you don't know for example where your name servers are pointing to or what your email related records are or website or later records are you can look them up using this tool it's so helpful I have this bookmark I use this constantly and if you are managing one or a thousand websites I recommend checking this out so if you've never touched your name server records chances are it's wherever you registered your domain originally from and so you can log in where you registered your website and you can change your name servers there if you want to change them to something else now let's talk about a records a records are basically simply related to your website you have your website name and then you have your IP address associated with that so when someone types in google.com for example the Internet is looking up the a record for that domain for Google com it's seeing that the Associated IP address where the web server is for that is what you see below starting with 1 7 2 . so on but thankfully and so we don't have to type into the internet that IP address we just type in google.com and the internet looks up the a record and sends us to that particular corresponding IP address awesome now the two fields that you'll see when looking at a records you have your domain and your IP address commonly when you are having a website and you have just a simple site your domain a record will be like the act symbol and that just means that it's your root domain when you're managing your DNS and editing your records you can actually have multiple different a records but you can only have an a record related to one IP address for your domain so you're gonna have so like in this example the a record for google.com is this IP address below but you can also have different IP addresses associated with websites that are subdomains of this so like if you have like as a good example docs.google.com there can be a different IP address for that so when someone goes to Google Docs they can go to potentially a different IP address or they'll go to the same one and they can just get routed to a different web page but you could conceivably have different web hosts hosting different websites related to different subdomains on your site if you wanted to and with your DNS records and editing them you can send people to different locations for that there are two fields with your a records you have your name and then you have the IP address the name is your either your root level domain which is usually signified by an @ symbol if it's just your plain domain it could be any sub domain whatever you want like in our example here docs for google it would be Doc's would be the name Menma corresponding IP address where our web server is located now the IP address field will point to wherever your website hosting servers are and they can be anywhere you can have website servers on like WP engine or GoDaddy or Squarespace wherever you want and they don't even have to be related to where domain is registered or where DNS records live it can be completely separate it doesn't matter but you have to have a website hosting set up somewhere else that you're going to be pointing the IP address to related to your one important thing is if you are just launching a website you need to at the website level launch the website first so like take it out of staging and bring it to this live stage before you change your a record so if I'm launching a website and I want to do it simply where I just want to change the a record from what it's whatever it's currently pointing to it whether it's an under-construction page or an old website and I want to change the IP address to my new site that is built on a different web server I'm gonna wait until I launch the website on the web server and then once that's launched then I'll change the a record for the main website and I'll change the IP address to wherever my web server is this is very important because if you just set your IP address as some host like WP engine for example if your site isn't live and set up as launched on that server then people are just going to end up getting to a 404 page because your hosting provider whether it's WP engine or whoever else they're not going to know that people coming to this domain for this I decide coming to this IP address for this domain they're not going to know where to send people because if they don't have a website with that name that's launched anywhere on their directory I just it's just not how its set up so make sure you launch your website first at your web host level wherever it is before you change the a record and change that IP address to wherever your hosting is that's an important tip to remember next I want to talk about MX records MX records R stands for mail exchange it's related to email so MX records are related to your email hosting provider and you for your email hosting you'll typically see that you have a mare from two to potentially five MX records in your DNS for managing your email and pointing people to where your email server is if you're using services like Gmail or office 365 or Soho for hosting your email you're going to be using basically the same MX records as everyone else at those services so most people who have their email hosted with G suite all have the same MX records people who are using Zoho for their email hosting have the same records and people who are using exchange typically have similar MX records although they can have unique configurations so with your different MX records there are a few different fields to be mindful of there's the name field there's mail server there's priority and there's TTL the name is typically just your website domain your mail server this is this will be different for each particular entry that you have for Zoho as an example there are gonna have three entries it's gonna be MX dot Zoho com MX - Joe calm and MX 3.0 calm entries for things like G sweet are like they're like usually five of them like alt one dot L dot ASP MX google.com doesn't matter the thing is with all of these you can look up the MX records pretty easily if you just go and search for G sweet MX records you will find that entire list after a mail server there's priority this number can range from zero to sixty six thousand or something like that but typically I've seen mostly you have priority of one ten twenty or fifty occasionally you'll see a priority level of zero I think that's typically I've seen that with exchange and then there's TTL which stands for time-to-live usually I just got that as automatic and it's fine next let's talk about cname records so cname record basically are what we use related to redirect so you'll have a name and a destination those are the two fields for C names now typically I'll set up a cname for www and point that to the @ symbol which is for the root domain so if someone wants to go to WWE my site com they'll get redirected to my main website because I don't want there to be a separate or any confusion between the WWN on WWE version of the site you may also see that if you are setting up email with like exchange for example you're gonna end up adding a bunch of cname records for things like mail dot your domain and that's going to be directed to a particular place mobile s IP and a couple other cname records for these particular names pointing to places related to your domain that's pretty common for exchange email in particular and that's really C names in a nutshell C names are redirects and tell people where to go related to a domain or particular subdomains that you have Oh lastly one also useful common record to have as a cname is an asterisk symbol which is a catch-all so if someone goes to one two three four five dot yourwebsite.com whatever you can get them redirected to the main page of your website and that for that value you would just set it as the @ symbol last tip is I keep saying the @ symbol which is a signifies the root domain some dns providers for whatever reason don't recognize the @ symbol and you just have to type out your root domain your website com whatever it is the last record type that I want to talk about real quick is the txt record type now txt records are used for a wide range of things a very wide range of functions but they typically just associate arbitrary text with your domain they're used for things ranging from like verifying your domain with Google that you own your domain or any other third-party service txt records can be used for related to verifying your domain with an email automation service to help deliverability so it can be a wide range there are two fields for txt records there's name and content the name can be anything related to your domain it can be blank it could just be your domain and then there is content and the content varies widely it can be something like MS verify google verify one two three four five a bunch of string of numbers whatever or if it's for email authentication of verification it could be something like V equals SPF include : domain something like that and that's txt records in a nutshell next up I want to talk about some pitfalls to avoid and some recommendations I have on tools so for pitfalls to avoid first when you're launching your website with a new TNS make sure that you have all your existing websites DNS records set up in that new DNS provider so if you are going to change your name servers to have them point to your particular service of choice like if your client had named servers and GoDaddy and you want to be managing the clients name server records in your cloud flower account as an example you can do that but first you need to ensure that your clients domain is in your DNS and set up and has all of their existing entries there so that when you change the name server records on their end to point to your name server that they don't lose anything because if you point someone's name servers to you or anywhere else that destination has to already have the DNS records setup otherwise your client is going to lose everything because when you change the name servers to your provider your and people are going to try and email your client if you don't have those MX records set up in your DNS provider then the emails are gonna get bounced when people go to the website the it's they're gonna see a 404 or does not exist and your client is going to be freaking out one pro tip I love CloudFlare so if you are going to manage your DNS and Dinos for your clients if you have a bunch of them I recommend having everything together in the ecosystem within CloudFlare it is free for particular uses they have a free tier if you're just doing simple DNS management which for this case we are and that's all you need you can have an account with all of your domains all your client domains just make sure that your those domains are pointing to your CloudFlare dns and then you can manage everything in CloudFlare one nice thing about CloudFlare is once you add a new domain to CloudFlare CloudFlare where will automatically suck from the internet all the DNS records all of that website and populate them in the CloudFlare account so if i were to add a add google.com or whatever into my CloudFlare account CloudFlare will suck out from the internet every DNS record for google and throw it into that CloudFlare account and then once I were to change Google's name servers why not and point to my CloudFlare account then everything would be set up and I won't lose anything if you're not using CloudFlare the best thing you can do and it's not foolproof is using MX toolbox to look up different DNS records now with MX toolbox you can look up different name server records you can look up a records you can look up MX records and see where all of that is but you can't get everything so if you you can't get for example different cname records without knowing exactly what the cname records are you can't get and things like that and so that games up being a pain and so if you're trying to change the name servers from wherever they're existing to another name server I recommend having an account with CloudFlare and doing it because it's free and just so much easier so if I were in CloudFlare and I were just to add in a domain of product dies com I see all I'll get all of the records automatically pulled up into CloudFlare and then I would change the name servers to point to my CloudFlare account in this case they are something NSTIC CloudFlare com there are two of them and that's how that would be set up if you are launching a website and all you want to do is launch a website and you want to keep it incredibly simple all you have to do all you have to do is change the a record to point to the new site and nothing will be lost if you just change in a record you're not gonna lose email just the website is gonna point from the old IP address to the new IP address just make sure though that you first launch the website as I was mentioning before on the web server and so that it points to the right place when the IP address changes last thing I want to do is talk about my workflow for launching a new website for a client can be for a client it could be for yourself you could be launching your own brand new website and want to make sure that everything goes off without a hitch and there are no problems or interruptions this is for you so there are two real ways that you can do this you can either do the name server change like I mentioned before or you can just do the a record change so I'm going to walk you through each of them now so if I'm going to do the name server that we're let's say my client has or I have my name servers and my domain all in GoDaddy but I want to manage them all in CloudFlare the first thing I would do is I would log in to my cloud floor account I will add the domain that I want to have in CloudFlare then automatically all of the related name server records are going to be populated into my CloudFlare account from the cname so the a records the MX txt and so on great now I have that all and cloud player next what I'm going to do I am going to want to launch the website I'll go into my web server where my hosting account wherever my website is I'll take it from staging to live and now the website is launched but no one can see it because the a records are not pointing to it then what I'll do in I'll go back to my cloud flower account where my name server where I want my name service to eventually point and then I'll change the a record and have that a record point to the IP address of my website server wherever that is and so if it's like WP engine I'll have it point to my WP engine IP address if it's a Hostgator or GoDaddy I'll have it point to that it's all fine then the last step that I'll do is I will change the name servers I'll need my clients access to this or if I it's my domain I'll just log into my GoDaddy account if you have clients who kind of may be reluctant to give you their user name and password for their GoDaddy account as an example they have what's called delegate access and so they can give you access to a specific domain if they want to and that can be great because they can give you access to their one domain you can then go in and change the name servers from GoDaddy's domain control name servers then point them to your specific CloudFlare name servers and then once you do that wait a few minutes a couple hours could be up to a day some and then you will see a magical change where the nameservers and everything is going to be pointing to your specific CloudFlare account in your dns including the a record and now your new website is live victory and that's all great that's method one but if you want to keep it incredibly simple and just to keep it a two-step process for launching a website you launch the website on the web server end you know launch your website take it out of staging and production and make it live great then you get access to your clients DNS wherever that is its GoDaddy you can get delegate access or wherever else just ask them for their credentials and get that and then login and then change the a record to your web host and then wait and wait and then the website is live and that's all that there is to it as a best practice I like to launch a website typically at the end of the day at night or on the weekend kind of when it's a less risky time from a business perspective to be launching the website and potentially having issues not that if you follow all these steps you shouldn't have any issues but just in case I want to make sure that there's nothing going wrong or nothing that we overlooked so I especially with like sites where they're very financially important like an e-commerce site I'll try and launch those websites overnight like 10:00 p.m. local time just as an example no matter what when I'm launching a website I need to coordinate this with the client make sure that they know that we're launching the website and get them confirmation that they know this is happening and once the site is live I get them to confirm that they can see it live and then it works for and let them know hey the websites live check it out let me know what you think sometimes though if you launch a website you may see it live before or after your client does this is just because of caching and propagation it can take a while for the website related changes to hit back to the servers that you're pinging and you just don't end up seeing them as soon as other people do so it can take so like for example I I've had situations where I can see a website is live but it would take the clients a couple more hours up to a day sometimes longer for them to actually see the website is live and this has been a real purely practical look at everything you need to know about DNS records from web website records to mail records tools you should use please check out MX toolbox com book market and if you're looking for a better way to bring sites live and manage your and TNS Iraq definitely recommend CloudFlare as a product they're free tear is great there's nothing to lose I'd give that a try as well lastly if you haven't yet please like this video subscribe to our channel we have a lot of other great videos related to web design marketing link building and everything kind of in between and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment below or message us you can find us online at off sprout com thanks [Music]

Channel: OffsproutTV

Views: 41,904

Keywords: dns records, nameserver, ns records, a records, mx records, txt records, godaddy, wpengine, website hosting, domain name system, cname record, a record, domain name system (protocol), dns, DNS record types, mxtoolbox, cloudflare

Id: YV5tkQYcvfg

Length: 30min 30sec (1830 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 15 2019