The Domain Name Service (DNS) is a critical part of the internet, and is what glues domains together with website, email, and more.
For most site owners and many website developers, DNS remains mysterious, not very well understood, yet something that must be dealt with at some point. Lack of a basic foundation for understanding DNS leads to hours of wasted time, accidental downtimes with sites, email delivery problems, and much frustration.
This page is meant to help solve that problem. It is written to provide concise, easy to understand, yet sufficiently detailed information, so you'll have a basic but solid foundation for when you need to deal with DNS.
You should read our page on Domains and the Four Service first, if you don't yet know the basics about domain registration, and the relation of Domain Registrars to DNS Providers, Website Hosting, and Email Hosting.
Zone / List of records
IP Address, Names, and More
Record Types
Registrar
Hosting Provider
Cloudflare
TTL
Authoritative Queries
Online tools
Command-line tools
Setting up new website
TTL
Ordering of changes: SPF, TTL, CNAME, A, NS
Setting up Email
Splitting Email / Website Hosting
Incoming Email
MX record, priority, Hostname vs. IP
Outbound Email
SPF, DKIM, DMARC
MX Toolbox
Setting Nameservers w/o zone
Not changing A record before NS
www
Multiple / Different A records
Mixed nameservers
AAAA records
DNSSEC
How DNS Works web comic
FTP
Cloudflare
Performance
Anycast
TODO - Review ↦ Search