Domains confuse a lot of people. Mostly because three different things get lumped together under “my domain”. Once you see them separately, it’s pretty straightforward stuff.
The Three Pieces
- Your registrar is the company where you bought the domain and renew it each year. GoDaddy, Namecheap, IONOS, Bluehost, Hostinger and so on. You own the domain through them.
- Your DNS is the address book that tells the internet where everything lives: your website, your email, any outside services. It can be managed somewhere different from the registrar.
- Your hosting is where your website’s files actually live. With Concierge Cloud, that’s my servers.
Email is a fourth thing again, and usually lives somewhere else entirely. See Your Business Email Inbox.
How I Handle DNS
For Concierge clients, I manage DNS through Cloudflare. It’s fast, it gives your site an extra layer of security, and it lets me handle DNS changes for you so you don’t have to fuss with it.
To make that happen, your domain’s nameservers get pointed at Cloudflare. That’s a setting at your registrar. Either you change it (I’ll give you the two exact nameserver addresses to enter), or you give me access to your registrar and I’ll do it. Your domain stays registered with you, at your registrar. Only the address book moves.
If you’d like your own access to Cloudflare, that works too. In that case your domain lives in your own (free) Cloudflare account, and you invite techservices [at] blogmarketingacademy.com to it as an administrator for that domain. Just let me know and we’ll set it up that way.
Changing Nameservers Without Breaking Anything
The thing people worry about most is email. Fair enough. If your DNS moves and your email records don’t come with it, email stops.
So before any nameserver change, I copy over all your existing DNS records: the ones for your email (MX records), for your email marketing service, for any subdomains, and so on. When the switch happens, everything keeps working.
A couple of tips:
- Turn off DNSSEC at your registrar before the nameservers change, if it’s on. Leaving it on during a move can take your site and email offline until it’s fixed. If you’re not sure, ask me and I’ll check.
- Enter the nameservers exactly as I send them. Cloudflare gives every domain its own pair, so copying a pair from somewhere else won’t work.
- Changes can take a few hours to spread across the internet. Sometimes up to a day. That’s normal.
When A Service Asks You To “Verify Your Domain”
Google Search Console, Kit, Leadpages, Microsoft and plenty of others will ask you to add a record to your DNS to prove you own the domain. Often they send you to a Cloudflare login you don’t have. Don’t worry about that.
Just send me what they’re asking for. Usually it’s a TXT or CNAME record with a name and a value. Post it in Basecamp (a screenshot is fine) and I’ll add it. Same goes for anything else that needs a DNS record, like a subdomain pointing at an outside service.
Keep Your Domain Renewed
Your domain is registered in your name, at your registrar, so renewing it is on you. I’d strongly recommend turning on auto-renew and making sure the card on file is current. An expired domain takes down your website and your email at the same time… and some registrars make it expensive to get it back.
Giving Me Access To Your Registrar
Most registrars let you add someone as a delegate or team member, which is better than sharing your password. GoDaddy has its own steps: see Sharing Domain Access On GoDaddy. For others (Namecheap, IONOS, Bluehost and so on), look for something like “account sharing”, “delegate access” or “manage users”, and invite techservices [at] blogmarketingacademy.com. If your registrar doesn’t offer it, see Passwords and Account Access.
A heads-up on IONOS: they sometimes insist on verifying changes by phone with a PIN, so we may need to coordinate a time.