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.
 

DrakNet is announcing a new shared hosting package targeted to small businesses that need high availability and redundancy on a smaller budget.

The new DrakNet Shared Failover Package is an insurance package for sites that cannot afford down time, or what we affectionately like to call “poor man’s redundancy”. In most situations, when you want to guaranty high availability the amount that you pay is going to go up exponentially in relation to the amount of redundancy you wish to have. These solutions have always been available, but only DrakNet has brought it together in one single package under the banner of one company that takes care of at all for less than $100 a month.

The Shared Failover Package includes two Bells and Whistles accounts, one located at our primary data center with Liquid Web in Lansing Michigan, and a secondary backup Bells and Whistles account at one of our secondary data centers at Wired Tree in Chicago, Illinois.

Instead of using DrakNet’s standard nameservers, we provide you with 5 enterprise name servers with integrated monitoring and automatic failover from outside both data centers from geographically dispersed locations – if, for any reason, your site’s availability stops on our primary servers, the integrated failover system will launch into action and make an immediate change to your DNS sending your clients, customers or readers to the backup installation on the Wired Tree Server.

With the $60 a month package, you are given the logins and access to both. You can choose to mirror the site completely by setting up your own software to sync the installations, or if you have a static site you can set it up once and forget about it, knowing that it’s ready to take over should there be any issues whatsoever with our main data center or the server you are on. Once the crisis passes, your site will be moved back to the main server.

With the $90 a month package, we will mirror the data on the backup site once a week for you. If you have a dynamic site that constantly changes, we can mirror the data at any frequency that you specify. Contact us with your needs and we’ll be happy to provide you with a quote.

DrakNet’s site is worth an estimated $36,636 – and that’s, like, not even counting you all and how much we could get for you if we decided to sell you (don’t worry, we’re not). How do we know? Well, we looked it up on DNSScoop, and we’re sure they wouldn’t lie to us.

Ok, they probably would.

But it’s still really, really fun to dig into the plethora of information available on the net. It’s almost like those goofy blog quizzes, only for your web site.

DNSScoop is just one of many, many, many services on the web that can give you information about not just your web site, but any web site. Sometimes the information is really accurate, and sometimes it should be taken with a grain of salt and for entertainment purposes only. We’re going to introduce you some of the ones we use, and tell you a little bit about them – both the sheer fun, and the useful.

Whois

Whois lookups are great to get the basic information about a domain – sometimes it will have the owner’s information including address, phone number, and email address. Years ago, before people knew what they were doing on the Internet, the Drak staff would look up celebrity domain names owned by the celebrities and see how many naive enough to public their information on their registration because they didn’t know anyone could look it up. Guess what? There were a lot.

Nowadays, people are more aware of how their information is published, and so you won’t find a whole lot of that anymore – what you will find is their DNS servers and those will usually tell you where they host. Some folks pay for privacy features from their registrar and mask everything, though they can’t easily mask where they are.

DomainTools

Domain Tools has some pretty neat little spying tricks, too – Name Server Spy will tell you how many domain names are hosted on a DNS server. Pulling up ns.drak.net today as we’re writing shows “This server has 1,831 domains on it.” – which is just about right (remember, this includes parked domains and add ons). You can get the number for free – if you want to spy on our ups and downs and monitor us, it’ll cost you.

Sometimes the results can be patently amusing bordering on the absurd when you look at a host’s claims on their site and what you find when you peek under the hood of the bluff and bluster and brags – but maybe that’s just if you’re in this industry and are easily amused by that sort of thing.

Some of the other neat stuff here is domain hosting history (trace where a site has hosted and how many times it’s moved to different hosts and what hosts), and a domain typo generator if you want to make sure you register common typos of your domain name.

IntoDNS

IntoDNS checks the health and configuration of DNS servers and mail servers and the nice part about it is that it’s free. If you have problems with your domain name resolving, want to check where it is resolving, or just see if your zone file’s correct and our DNS is set up right, you can check it out here.

My IP Neighbors

Who’s your IP neighbor? Who do we host? How many people are on your server? Well, you actually can find out using publicly available information. Despite some folks treating it like a secret, it’s actually not a secret at all and you can find out exactly who shares your server with you and peruse some of the folks that call your IP neighborhood home.

My IP Neighbors allows you to put in your IP address and see who’s sharing your IP with you. You can peruse all the sites that resolve to your server (well, most of them, unless they have a dedicated IP) and click around to see how diverse one server can actually be. It’s kind of like a huge melting pot of ideals and businesses and is pretty neat, if we do say so ourselves.

Just remember – on a server as in real life, sometimes, you don’t want to know who your neighbors are.

Want to sit around for a few hours and check out almost everyone we host? Just use the server names instead of your domain name and you’ll get almost 90% of them.