DNS Zone Editing Now Available
All accounts now have DNS Zone editing available in their cPanel, under their “Domains” button. This is a very handy button – and it can totally take your web site offline if you enter things incorrectly. Anyone cheering about this button likely knows enough about DNS to know what to do with it, so we’re going to focus this more on the folks going:
“Um. Cool?”
Simple
Under “Domains”, you have two buttons, one marked “Simple DNS Zone Editor” and one marked “Advanced DNS Zone Editor”.. As you could kind of figure from the name, “Simple” gives you less of an ability to get into trouble, while advanced lets you shake up the house.
Under Simple, your first option is to add an “A” Record. An A (address) record is a DNS record that can be used to point your domain name and host names to a static IP address. This can be useful if you have a home computer on a static IP you want to be able to get into and you don’t want to remember the IP address, or you have remotely hosted billing software that allows you to point to their IP to make it look more like your own with a subdomain. An A record has to have an IP address.
When putting in the subdomain, you would only include the first part – so, say I wanted shop.drak.net to go to Alakazam for some reason, and Alakazam has the set up to take the name and apply it and all that jaz. I would enter “shop” where it asks for name, and “67.225.155.190″ where it asks for the address, and then hit “Add A Record”. That’s it.
A CName is a little bit different. CNAME stands for “canonical name”. A CNAME record maps an address to its canonical name. When a name server looks up a name and finds a CNAME record, it replaces the name with the canonical name and looks up the new name. So, if I wanted shop.drak.net to point to myshopsomewhere.com, I would put “shop” as the name, and “myshopsomewhere.com” as the CNAME.
Advanced
Advanced also lets you add something to the above, which is TTL. TTL is an acronym for Time To Live and refers to the capability of the DNS servers to cache DNS records. It represents the amount of time that a DNS record for a certain host remains in the cache memory of a DNS server after the latter has located the host’s matching IP address.
OK, english? A very, very, very simplified explanation:
For the very first time, you’re trying to visit a site on our servers. Your computer and ISP and so on ask the registrar where to look, and the registrar says “go to DrakNet’s DNS”, and so you do. Our DNS servers say “here’s the site on this server over here and btw, the TTL is 14400″, and so that’s how you know where the site is. The TTL we gave you is 4 hours – what that means is that we promise that information won’t change for 4 hours, so don’t bother asking us until then. The site will be there – but in a few hours, it may not be, so go ahead and ask us again – but not until then.
The servers that need that information keep it and assume that the site will be at X location, and that’s where they will send you up until its time to ask again.
This cuts down on constant requests to the DNS servers.
Advanced gives you access to your own main domain’s record as well, so you can change its TTL, or delete it altogether. Though we don’t suggest you do that. 
OK, but what do I do with it?
Most of the time, you won’t need to mess with any of this information at all. There may be times, though, that you’ll sign up for a service like Google Apps or Etsy and they’ll give you an option to extend a domain name or subdomain name to their location to brand it more as yours. If they tell you to add an A record or CName to your DNS records, now you’ll know where to go to do just that.
Later on this week, we’ll take you step by step through setting up Google Apps yourself, if you’d like to do so.
*The above graphic came from our fabulous data center’s Knowledge Base, and we ripped it off mercilessly because they love us and probably won’t kill us for it. Follow the link to read a great, simplified overview of DNS written by Liquid Web.
Tags: dns
