Control Your Domain Registration

Your domain registration is critically important. It's easy to get lazy about this stuff. Often your ISP or whoever set up your web site said they'd "take care of it" and that was it. It's been working fine for years, and you don't have to worry about it.

But you do need to worry about it. In fact, you need to take control of it, and review that control regularly to make sure you still have it. If you lose control, it can be time consuming and difficult to get it back - in fact, you could even lose your domain name, though that's not the subject discussed here.

Let's review DNS for a moment. This is external DNS, not the DNS you may be using inside your own network to identify machines. This DNS is the one that lets you get mail if you have a mail server and lets people get to your website. It is extremely important. Yes, it's geek talk, you don't want to hear it, you want someone else to take care of this, but it's too important for that. You need to understand this or everything can come to a grinding halt.

Your web site is registered with one of the official registrars. From your point of view, you may have paid money to someone else for the domain registration, but it's one of these places that really did the work, and there is one critical piece of information they control about your domain. That piece of data is the address of the name servers responsible for resolving addresses in your domain. So, if you are xyz.com, somewhere there is a name server that knows where www.xyz.com is, where mail.xyz.com is and so on. The registrar doesn't necessarily know or care where www.xyz.com is, but they do have to know who does know that.

Life used to be more simple. There was one, and exactly one registrar: Network Solutions. You did the domain registration with them, and that was it. Actually, there was a time when it was even more simple, but from your point of view, somewhere there is a database that keeps track of you and me and everyone else. It isn't your registrar who actually keeps that database, but they are allowed to access it to update information. So that's the flow: your registrar knows where your DNS servers are, and they tell the central servers. The overall control of all this is now in the hands of ICANN.

<< Previous    [1]  2  3    Next >>