Webhosting & You

Why is DNS important. Let me put it in layman’s terms. DNS is important since it’s kind of like a phone book for the internet. Bear with me as this is going to be watered down considerably for ease of consumption.

Every domain you go to whether it be www.yahoo.com, digg.com or even tech.doodleboy.org typically have a machine address in an ipv4 notation such as 123.456.789.123 . Now, remembering this address for every site you go to would be rather hard. Hence DNS.

When you request a domain from any program such as a web browser or ftp client or send an email, that request goes to a DNS server (your isp’s dns server first) to find out what the machine address is for that domain. If that first DNS server doesn’t know the machine address (called an ip address) then it will ask the DNS server above it and so on until a DNS server that knows the ip address of the domain you want can reply back with the appropriate ip address information back down the chain.

Often the initial DNS server that your computer asked will then cache the information for future use. This is why typically it takes at least an hour or two to make changes to your dns setting for a domain. The information must propagate to many server who have internal caches that don’t reload often (every 24 hours).

Now, why is this important to you? DNS is needed so someone can find your domain. If you are hosting your own site (home pc / own servers) then you have a few choices on how to handle dns. This article is geared toward those that do their own hosting.

Choices:

• Run your own using DNS software. Some common DNS servers.
  • Microsoft Windows DNS (found in server editions)
  • Bind (free)
  • SimpleDNS
  • Comparison of popular DNS server packages
• Use someone else’s DNS services. A sampling below:
  • Zoneedit (free)
  • FreeDNS (free)
  • XName (free)

When you initially buy a domain name from a registrar like godaddy or network solutions, you are asked during that process what the name servers will be. These nameserver (typically ns1.something.com and ns1.something.com) point to the domain name server that will tell the world where to find your domain. In my next article I will illustrate how this works.

What are my goals with this blog. Well, besides dispensing with useful advice and technical information, I’d like to try to publish at least one article per business day and on the occasional weekend. Also, I’ll answer people’s questions, both technical and non-technical in relation to building websites, coding or hosting.

Welcome! So what’s this blog all about. Well, I’ve been in the hosting business for well over 7 years in some capacity or another. Most of my experience has been on windows but with many open source and pay software ranging from web servers / email servers and ftp servers. I hope to be able to give some great advice here on resolving issues and questions that come up. This site is more geared toward someone who wants to build their own machines, host them in their own data centers and come up with decent practices to handle clients.