“Do employees at other agencies learn all of this stuff?”
This was our first employee, Courtney. She asked while I gave her an overview of a client’s DNS records in cPanel.
I’ve been told by other agency owners the width of knowledge we expect our team members to accumulate is unrealistic. They say DNS records are for the IT or dev team, not the marketing team. For big agencies with those teams, sure. We’re not a big agency though.
With the crackdown on email security over the past couple of years, everyone on our team has become reasonably proficient at managing DNS records. More than a handful of times now we’ve come across complicated (and unnecessarily costly) setups. Our team has recognized this, but doesn’t know how to simplify it, understandably because the ability to do so is outside of their control.
A Typical Business Setup
So let’s talk about a typical setup.
Virtually all businesses have three things:
- Domain name (e.g. codysee.com)
- Website (i.e. the files, often organized by a CMS, like WordPress)
- Emails (name@businessdomain.com)
Various companies offer commercial solutions for these services. Some of them can take care of everything (example: GoDaddy). Others do a couple, but not all (a common combination is domain name + website hosting). As you might expect, some specialize in doing just one.
It’s important to understand that structurally, these three things are not on the same level. A website and emails are dependent on a domain name — a website’s files are made accessible to the world by the domain name, and professional emails end with the domain name, so without it, they can’t exist.
Here’s a simple drawing explaining this hierarchy.
To make these three things connect to work together, there are two more tech terms you need to know.
- Nameservers
- DNS records
You don’t need to know what these words mean. I run a digital marketing agency, interact with them at least monthly, taught our team how to manage them, and I can’t tell you precisely what they mean. What’s important is that you understand their role in the hierarchy.
At your domain name registrar you point to your nameservers. Your nameservers detail your DNS records. Your DNS records specify your website and email.
Here’s an updated drawing of the hierarchy.
Here’s where it gets weird. If your domain name and website are with the same company, you only have to worry about one set of DNS records, but if your domain name and website host are different companies, both places will have their own set of DNS records. The only place that matters is the one you point your nameservers to — the other set of DNS records will be ignored.
You might be wondering, which is better? Should I manage DNS records at my domain name registrar or my web host? With our very first clients before we knew the difference, we pointed their nameservers to us. I think this can be simpler because tools like cPanel make DNS management easier for people who don’t really know what they’re doing. That was us when we were new. Now, we generally tell clients to keep their DNS records with their domain registrar. If you’re doing everything by yourself though, I would (and do for my own websites) just point your nameservers to your web hosting company.
If people switch website providers a couple of times, they can end up in funky situations. Here’s a scenario we’ve experienced frequently enough that it motivated me to write this article. I’ll put a common company in parenthesis as an example for each applicable service provider.
Mr. Smith’s (the client’s) domain name is at one company (GoDaddy). His nameservers are pointed to another company for website hosting (Squarespace). For emails, he uses a separate company as well (Google Workspace). Since the nameservers for his domain are pointed to the web hosting company, that means his active DNS records are at the hosting company. It also means that is where his email records are configured.
Let’s imagine Mr. Smith wants a new website with a new company (Bluehost). Logistically, he has two options.
Option #1 is to update his active DNS records to point to his new website. This is the easier and less disruptive of the two options. The problem is that, after doing this, he’ll be paying a company for DNS records management and nothing else.
DNS record management can be done for free at either a domain name registrar or a web hosting company. That’s option #2: Update the nameservers to point back to the domain registrar, then update the DNS records there to point to his new website (technically, a third option would be to update the nameservers to point to the new web host, but that would put him back in the same situation next time this happens).
At first glance, option #2 only looks like one extra step. The problem is what it does to the hierarchy: New nameservers mean new DNS records, and new DNS records mean a new website (great!) and new email configuration (wait, no!). In other words, unless you reconfigure your emails with the new DNS records, they won’t work — no more emails.
Any DNS records impacting email need to be copied over from the old DNS records to the new ones. This means any MX, CNAME, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records.
As for what individual DNS records mean, I’ll leave that article to someone else who I’m sure can explain much better. I just wanted to explain this in the way it was never explained to me.