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.
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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 had a disastrous downtime of my website domain after replacing the name servers of my registrar Host Europe by those of a service provider.
Host Europe technical support told me that they immediately delete DNS entries on their name servers if you do so.
Is it possible, that the downtime of my website was because machines still asked the old name servers and they said “don’t know”? (I don’t know much about DNS.)
And is it normal for registrars to act this way?
How does it Google Domains? How Cloudflare Registrar?
And how to avoid the problem? Is a big TLL better or a small one? I think I had set it to 10 Minutes before switching.
Your question is offtopic here as not related to programming so might get deleted, but the following was too long to put in a comment to help you:
Host Europe technical support told me that they immediately delete DNS entries on their name servers if you do so.
This is very bad behaviour. Their nameservers will still get queries for basically the amount of time being the TTL of the NS records at parent.
Is it possible, that the downtime of my website was because machines still asked the old name servers and they said “don’t know”?
Yes this is exactly what happened.
An old provider should never pull the plug immediately. There are a lot of caches in the DNS.
If you can control the TTL values on your records, you can try adjusting them upwards at old provider, before the nameservers change. It may help a little or not at all, and not all DNS providers let people choose TTL freely. Somewhere around 1 week would be a good ballpark here.
And is it normal for registrars to act this way? How does it Google Domains? How Cloudflare Registrar?
Normal as in "unfortunately widespread", probably yes, but can't comment on any specific company. Note also that here the problem is not with the registrar role, but the DNS provider role. Both can be same companies, but are different roles. There are no worldwide DNS organization, where for registrars many of them are ICANN accredited (but they say nothing about this case IIRC), and in all cases are accredited by registries. I can say for sure that at least one registry (AFNIC for .FR) does mandate/require/recommend (not sure of the wording) registrars/DNS providers to keep the old DNS configuration in case of a change. I don't think though that it is checked nor enforced unfortunately.
And how to avoid the problem? Is a big TLL better or a small one? I think I had set it to 10 Minutes before switching.
It does not matter because what comes into play is the TTL (Time To Live) of the NS records at the parent (the registry handling the TLD under which your domain is registered), which you have 0 control over.
Unfortunately there is no real proper counter measure here, your DNS provider needs to do its job properly and not cut down resolution immediately.
A partial solution could be something akin to:
add nameservers without removing current one: note that they need to be listed in the zone, AND you need to change the domain at the registry, otherwise you will be in a lame delegation case (which you can also decide to sustain, but it is bad in general)
after some time (typically again the TTL at parent), you can now remove the old servers (again both in the zone and at parent).
That way even if the old nameservers stop to work immediately for your domain, all resolvers would have time to learn about the new ones, and even if they try to contact old nameservers, and get an error, they may (not guaranteed to always work and of course at least introducing some delays) switch to the new ones. Until again the same TTL passes after second point after which all resolvers will know only about the new nameservers.
Another trick that could work but means you will be in a lame delegation case is the following. It works because a lot of resolvers, including big ones like Google Public DNS are child centric instead of parent centric: you change the zone content to list the new nameservers as NS records, removing old ones and you do NOT do any change at the registry side. This will let some resolvers (but not all) learn about new nameservers and after some time you can do the switch at the registry.
I'm at wits end. I have a WordPress site that will be advertised in a major newspaper in a few hours. I tried setting it up with Cloudflare in anticipation of the traffic but it wasn't working so I turned cloudflare off and reset back the dns setting back to my original DNS servers. It's been about 2 hours and the site is still not coming up for me on my ISP. How can I tell how widespread this problem is? I have tried various online tools but I am getting mixed results and I'm not sure how to interpret them and I'm not sure if the site is resolving. I removed the site totally from Cloudflare. I would think it would have propagated by now and so I'm getting really nervous that something is wrong.
Thanks!
Do NOT make repetitive DNS actions especially changing dns servers. any way to check propagation this tool is good enough https://dnschecker.org/ and on if you try on your own machine always use incognito or private browsing and clear your DNS chace ipconfig /flush dns
for the cloudflare you have to add all dns entries, change name servers on registrar panel and wait for propagation.
Ok it may sound strange, but I forgot where is one of my websites hosted.
I remember the domain name and I have access to setup the DNS server, but I don't remember the nameserver. It was something like ns113.icndns.net but I checked and the domain is not there.
When I use that tool I see my domain name listed there: https://viewdns.info/reverseip/?host=nemo.icnhost.net&t=1
But what are the dns server names? Is there an easy way to find or am I missing something general knowledge? Please help.
p.s. I don'g have access to the hosting account and the guy having it will return at the end of the week, but it is too late.
Some website do the job for you, such as https://who.is
it will give informations regarding a specific url.
You can also use command whois from nslookup tools to resolve those kinds of problems
https://www.manpagez.com/man/1/whois/
cheers
I have a very recently purchased website say www.existingdomain.org (both domain name and hosting purchased with the same hosting company). I have not yet submitted this to search engines as the website development is still in progress.
Now, I have realized that the name www.existingdomain.org is not so good, so want to change the name say like www.newdomain.org (just a domain name only without hosting plan) and require that when search for www.newdomain.org, it should get redirected to www.exisitngdomain.org.
1) I wanted to know, if I can achieve the domain redirection by purchasing www.newdomain.org with say some other domain registrar (different from my www.existingdomain.org) for example godaddy.com as a parked domain without any hosting and then following the steps for forwarding/redirecting this to www.existingdomain.org? Please clarify.
2) For this redirection, is it enough to modify the settings for the www.newdomain.org at godaddy.com only OR any updates need to be done to the www.existingdomain.org configuration also?
3) I read many reviews that Google treats domain alias as duplicate content. Hence, wanted to go for domain redirection. Since my www.existingdomain.org was purchased very recently and still development is in progress and not yet submitted to search engines, hope domain redirection is fine. Please advise which one is best domain redirection or alias in my case.
4) Also, please advise whether domain alias or redirect is best with respect to search engines.
Please, provide clarifications to my 3 points above using www.existingdomain.org and www.newdomain.org for explanation purposes.
if you just purchased the domain then just scrap it and start fresh with the domain you really want, no reason in wasting time doing redirects and aliasing.