It is quite challenging when the clock ticks time for a blogger to change his DNS settings. This surely happens eventually when you have a blog operating a domain name registered through domain registrar or webhost. If you could be clear on the lay man understanding of basic DNS setting, this is one block you could walk- not jump over!
Now, let us take sometime to understand some conventional DNS settings terminology which could be required of you to employ a separate host for email services (including Google Business apps) or changing your blog host as well as occupying your email address extension with your domain name.
1. DNS
DNS means Domain Name System. This acronym represents the IP (Internet Protocol) address your blog uses for hosting. A server with different hosted blogs shares one IP address for all its occupants. It is possible to find out your IP address by looking it up online. IP addressees are presented as 1o digits preferably in the following format :##.###.##.###.
2. NS RECORD
NS Record means Name Server Record. You could be recommended to change your name servers with your domain registrar when you want to change your email host or blog host. This simply means you need to as well change your Name Server (NS ) record.
The proper web location when your site migrates is pretty important. If you therefore change your host, your IP addresses changes as well with the server as this would identify the DNS information for your site. If you don’t change the primary and secondary NS records, then browsers would be referred to your former server whose tenancy you have exhausted.
If this is not done, it would be impossible for your URL to lead to your blog on a browser. This you could do by correlating NS records to your new server or your blog. NS records are alphanumeric and typically formatted similar to ns1.example.net.
3. A RECORD
This is an Address record. It is adopted to match the particular IP address of the server where your blog is hosted to your blog’s domain name. This allows visitors to access your site with the right IP identification.
4. CNAME RECORD
This represents Canonical Name record. It links two domains, or matches two sub domains. For example, you could manouever a CNAME record identifying www.yoursite.com to yousite.com, or you could develop a subdomain for your email (such as mail.yoursite.com) employing a CNAME stating the right location for email access.
5. MX RECORD
This points domain’s email to the server with which your account is hosted; or example, olu@justnaira.com- to the hosting server. MX record are that important, else receiving or sending email messages would be a luxury!
6. TXT Record
This couples DNS records with text. It is very versatile especially for web developers, as a blogger, it could serve domain verification purposes when hosting through an external domain registrar or blog host as the case might be.
7. Time to Live (TTL)
Every DNS record presents a correlating TTL value . This figure interacts with servers attempting to access your blog and communicates to them how regularly to check your blog for updates to your DNS records. As a popular convention, setting the TTL value to 3600 is bright! This setting helps servers to access your records for corrections once every hour. You can vary up down the TTL value as preferred to execute changes with the needed pace
8. DNS Propagation
This the time lapse required for adjusted DNS records variations to be presented live across the internet. Basically, this takes 24 to 48 hours to fully distribute across the internet and the world. This means visitors around the world could find it hard to reach site at your new host until the new DNS settings have been totally dispersed.
