Sourcetoad is mainly a custom software and web app company, but that still means that our finished products need website names. When your website is out of the oven and you want to take it from our testing server to the whole wide Internet, you need to make sure that people can get to it. Websites live on computers that are hooked up to the Internet all day long and are never turned off. They run a special piece of software that listens for it's name to be called, and then when it hears it, it's name, it serves up a webpage. It's not really any different from the computer you're reading this on in fact, but we call it a "Server" anyway and it sounds really impressive.
Computers don't really have names, they have addresses. These address are like street addresses which tell internet traffic where to go. For example 208.71.173.106 might mean to go to the main traffic router at your Internet Service Provider take a left. Just like directions. The address will eventually (in a second or two) guide your computer to the right server, and viola! You'll be at that website. The only problem is, IP address are pretty difficult to remember, unless your a network engineer or just really really bored. So we have domain names.
Domain names are things like Sourcetoad.com or CNN.com or YouSite.net. These are nicknames for IP addresses. DNS is the process of routing domain names (like yourdomain.com) to those IP addresses (like 208.71.173.106). So what we need to do is link the two together.
There are two ways to do this.
1. Your Registrar (the place where you bought your domain name from, probably Godaddy, Network Solutions or Tucows), has three separate fields that are editable (they have a lot more, but three important ones for this discussion). One is your MX records (these point to your mail server) and the other two are your "ARecord" records and your "CNAME" records. They work like this:
- You assign the IP address of your web server to the ARecord. It should look something like this:
- ARecord @ 208.71.173.106 (we're giving this domain name the nickname "@")
- This tells the Internet that this domain name is linked to the server with that address.
- You can then create CNAMEs, which are more descriptive pointers, and they are very useful when you have things like subdomains. For example:
- CNAME www @ (this tells the internet that going to http:// www.yourdomain.com is the same as going to http://yourdomain.com
- CNAME mobile yourdomain.com/mobile (this directs anyone going to http://mobile.thecarbclinic.net to http://yourdomain.com/mobile)
- Finally, we have the MX records. Because so many people these days use a separate email service (like Google mail) MX records tell Internet traffic control where to send emails.
- For example: MX @ smtp.gmail.com - tells any incoming traffic that sending email from anyone@yourdomain.com should be passed on to Google's mail server.
So this is a little complex and confusion (trust me, it took me a while to get it down), but it is very useful. It allows you to control every little aspect of your Internet identity.
There is another, and much easier way to do all of this, but you'll have to trust your hosting provider (in your case, us).
2. We can become you "Name Server" - that means that everything that ends with yourdomain.com comes to us. Everything! That includes email and web traffic. We can then make all of these changes and settings on our server and you'll never have to worry about them. Our name servers are NS1.SOURCETOAD.INFO and NS2.SOURCETOAD.INFO. In your Registrars setting you should see a spot to put these in.
Be careful though. Lets say that you don't have a website at the moment (or you have one on our testing server) and you DO have a working email account at your domain name eg tony@yourdomain.com - if you go to www.yourdomain.com right now, you'll get a site not found message (probably from your Internet Service Provider) - This tells us that your Registrar (the place where you bought your domain name from, probably GoDaddy, Network Solutions or Tucows) is not pointing any web traffic, but it IS pointing mail traffic. If you are going to switch over to our name servers, then we'll need to know where your email is currently going to. You'll need to send us the MX records in the admin section of your Registrar BEFORE you change the name servers.
3. Finally, if you trust us even more, you can send us the username and password of your Registrar (in your case MWeb Business) and we can log in and make all the changes for you. We will not transfer the domain or mess your email up, we promise :)
That should give you some idea of what you'll need to do to get your site up and running from dev-site solitude (probably sitting on a Software development box in Tampa) to world wide reachablity!