I run a small e-commerce platform, and over the past two years have grown customers.
There's around 100 customers now and their domains point to our server IP by the use of two A records (# and www).
I'm not experienced in this area so I need someone who's knowledgable about setting up major SaaS projects.
The worry I have is, if for whatever reason I change host, wouldn't I lose the IP address? And surely at that point, I may need to ask over 200 customers to change their DNS settings to point to our new server?
A friend said to me about using a CNAME (pointing to a domain I own), but another professional server contact told me that it's not ideal. What further confuses me is this:
If my point remains true (and that an IP isn't able to be owned), then how come Squarespace and a few other major players have an option to instruct their users that they can use an A record to point to their (squarespace/wix..) IP address? Do they know something I don't (do they own an IP?)? What happens if squarespace for whatever reason have to change IP, surely 100,000's+ customers would need to change their IP A records? This seems very impractical and not realistic. It really confuses me.
I'd really appreciate some enlightening in this area, because I need to know sooner rather than later if I dig myself into a hole if I get over 500 customers and for whatever reason I end up having to ask 500 of them to change DNS settings.
Thanks.
I have been thinking about moving my domain over to my website hosting provider to store the DNS records inside cPanel. I believe it would be nice to keep both the website and domain together using one service.
My question is, are there any downsides to storing your DNS on your cPanel. I guess my concern would be if my hosting provider went down then I could possibly end up waiting for my DNS propagate again. If my TTL was set to 24 hours I could be experiencing a rather large downtime if I was unlucky enough.
How do other people normally reduce this risk? Should I be keeping a constant low TTL on my DNS at all times? Or should my DNS be hosted separate to my website. How do other people handle DNS downtime?
I have done some research regarding the matter but I haven't seen it discussed anywhere before and would just like some insight into the matter.
I finally found an answer to my question which was provided by my hosting company.
They run the DNS on a clustering system which means that even if the server goes down, DNS should continue to function, so no DNS propagation would need to re-occur should the hosting server go down.
I assume this would be common practice among shared hosting companies. It's definitely interesting to know.
I've discovered a couple Node.js modules that allow for checking DNS records for domains, but none that allow for changing and setting DNS records to update domains.
Is what I'm asking even possible? I'm just looking for a step in the right direction.
I am using DNS Made Easy for my DNS servers, if that helps.
I think it really depends on the DNS server you're using. There are some standardized ways to update DNS servers - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_DNS, or if you're using a service like afraid.org, then they have a REST-ish/HTTP endpoint you can call to update DNS records. There's no reason you couldn't initiate that call from node.js. That said - if you're trying to do real DDNS, you might have to implement a more tricky protocol to get it to happen. Some DNS servers just read text files from the disk, so you could also build something that updates those files and the domain serial number and reloads the server when an update occurs. TL;DR: it's possible, but you might have to implement some tricky stuff to get it to work.
Right, so i've been trying to transfer a website to a different company, and in order for them to host it i have had to change the nameservers to point at them. i have changed them in the WHM settings through the "edit DNS Zone" tab, yet whenever i use something like mxtoolbox it tells me that the old nameservers are still the parent ones. how can i change this or remove them?
i am very new to all of this website hosting intricacies so apologies for any follow up questions if i do not understand :)
You should change your domain nameservers at the registrar so they point to the new DNS servers provided by your web hosting company. That's the first step.
Then issue a whois on the domain and check if the correct nameservers appear there in the whois info (you can use a tool like http://whois.domaintools.com). If the nameservers shown there are not the correct ones then you have to change them.
I want to check a particular website from various locations. For example, I see a site example.com from the US and it works fine. The colleague in Europe says he cannot see the site (gets a dns eror).
Is there any way I can check that for my self instead of asking him every time?
This is a bit of self promotion, but I built a tool to do just this that you might find useful, called GeoPeeker.
It remotely accesses a site from servers spread around the world, renders the page with webkit and sends back an image. It will also report the IP address and DNS information of the site as it appears from that location.
There are no ads, and it's very stream-lined to serve this one purpose. It's still in development, and feedback is welcome. Here's hoping somebody besides myself finds it useful!
Sometimes a website doesn't work on my PC and I want to know if it's the website or a problem local to me(e.g. my ISP, my router, etc).
The simplest way to check a website and avoid using your local network resources(and thus avoid any problems caused by them) is using a web proxy such as Proxy.org.
Well, DNS should be the same worldwide, wouldn't it? Of course it can take up to a day or so until your new DNS record is propagated around the world. So either something is wrong on your colleague's end or the DNS record still takes some time...
I usually use online DNS lookup tools for that, e.g. http://network-tools.com/
It can check your HTTP header as well. Only a proxy located in Europe would be better.
Besides using multiple proxies or proxy-networks, you might want to try the planet-lab. (And probably there are other similar institutions around).
The social solution would be to post a question on some board that you are searching for volunteers that proxy your requests. (They only have to allow for one destination in their proxy config thus the danger of becoming spam-whores is relatively low.) You should prepare credentials that ensure your partners of the authenticity of the claim that the destination is indeed your computer.
DNS info is cached at many places. If you have a server in Europe you may want to try to proxy through it
It depends on wether the locatoin is detected by different DNS resolution from different locations, or by IP address that you are browsing from.
If its by DNS, you could just modify your hosts file to point at the server used in europe. Get your friend to ping the address, to see if its different from the one yours resolves to.
To browse from a different IP address:
You can rent a VPS server. You can use putty / SSH to act as a proxy. I use this from time to time to brows from the US using a VPS server I rent in the US.
Having an account on a remote host may or may not be enough. Sadly, my dreamhost account, even though I have ssh access, does not allow proxying.
The only thing that springs to mind for this is to use a proxy server based in Europe. Either have your colleague set one up [if possible] or find a free proxy. A quick Google search came up with http://www.anonymousinet.com/ as the top result.