Matt Faulkner

Professional Goober

How to Setup and Manage a Web Domain

If you like what you read below and find my knowledge useful, I’d be more than happy to “Manage” your web domain and assosiated functions. Reach out by email for a quote or to setup a discovery call.

Preface

This guide was written to help non-technial small business owners navigate the challenges of managing as web domain. While reading this, please understand that Domain Name Registration, DNS Hosting, Email Hosting, and Web Hosting are entirely segmented systems. You do not have to use the same provider for all of these services. Actually I find it best to leverage the best in each catagorey simply because you can!

Registrar and Authoritive Name Servers

First you’ll need to pick a Domain Registrar. This is the company that establishes your temporary ownership of a domain with its recognized organizations such as ICANN. Here is a list of reputable companies…. They will provide you with Authotitive Name Servers.

When purchasing your domain, you will pay for it in yearly increments. You can typically register a domain for up to 10 years at a time. It is a huge red flag if a Domain Registrar charges for WHOIS privacy and/or does not have an easy to use API for record management. I’m looking at you GoDaddy!

BEWARE! If you let a domain expire, it is difficult to nearly impossible to recover. Do NOT let it lapse.

Website Hosting and Website Setup

Now that you have registered your Domain Name, it’s time to select a Web Hosting Provider. This is where it can get tricky, because I do not know what your requirements or budget are. I’ll be a bit vague to cover most situations….

When you purchase a Managed WordPress plan or a Virtual Private Server (VPS) You will likely be provided 3x DNS records you will need to deploy.

  • A Record - Public IPv4 Address
  • AAAA Record - Public IPv6 Address
  • CNAME - Plain Text Alias addresses.

It is best practice to create “Root” or “@” records for both the Apex (no subdomain) and the www subdomain. You should create both these records (root and subdomain) under both A and AAAA records. Yes, this means you will have 2x A records, and 2x AAAA records.

Now you will also want to create a CNAME record for your www subdomain. If you have a Content Delivery Network (CDN) then you will point your www CNAME towards the hostname they’ve provided you. Otherwise you will point your www subdomain towards your apex domain. This is known as CNAME flattening. Not all DNS providers will support this, but most will.

WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS) is actually very stable and secure. The community plugins are where the problems typically lay. It is best practice to uninstall unused themes and plugins, as well as only using the bare minimum plugins.

Email Hosting and Email Setup

Email Server Hosting is a difficult task even for experienced sysadmins. I find Email is best left to the email experts below. Email is also routed based on DNS, specifically MX records and TXT records.

You can’t stop bad actors from attempting to impersonate you, but you can secure your domain! It is important to ensure you have valid TXT records for Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) configured. This gives you the ability to force a bad actors emails to land in spam or rejected entirey. This prevents them from landing in someones Email Inbox!

Records Management

Every record has a Time to Live value otherwise known as TTL. This is how many seconds a client device should cache a record before requesting the answer again. The global default is 1 hour. 3600 seconds. If you are going to be performing changes to critical records it is best practice to step down the TTL to 300 seconds. Then wait out the last TTL to begin your change. This will reduce downtime.

Domains can be transferred between Registrars. To prevent fraud, they are by default “locked”. You will need to unlock a domain to tranfer it. This typically also generates a transfer token.

A domain must be active with a Registrar for 60 days to be available for transfer. Here is a great ICANN article about the process.

Resources

Cloudflare - Email Security

DigiCert - CNAME Flattening

DNS Checker - Go here to see DNS replication across the globe.

MX Toolbox - Go here to check on MX records and their health.

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