Understanding Your DNS Provider’s Dashboard
Have you ever needed to update your DNS but you weren't sure what to do? Because there are so many DNS Providers, creating support documentation on all of their DNS dashboards is quite a large task.
In this video, we'll walk you through what a typical dashboard contains and how you can make use of it.
We'd recommend you have your DNS dashboard open as you follow along here.
The purpose of this video is to provide you a look at a standard dns provider’s dashboard so you can become familiar with yours when it comes time to make a dns change.
DNS consoles change from provider to provider but there are certain things you want to look for no matter who your DNS provider is in order to understand how to update your DNS records.
First, you can find what DNS Record Types your provider supports by looking for things like “A” or “CNAME”. You might see this in Table format, like GoDaddy, which will normally have the Record Type in the table header or Row format, like CloudFlare, which will normally have the DNS record type on the left hand side.
This can help you understand how your DNS provider formats their record so you can be sure to update the correct one.
Second, you will see a field that says something along the lines of “Host”. This is asking for what part of the domain you want to change the record for. For example, you might see the @ symbol, which will change the root domain record. For example, a root domain would be mydomain.com or mywebsite.org.
If you see a Host of www or ftp, those are referring to Subdomains. For example, a record with the host of www would represent www.mydomain.com.
Third, you will see another field like “Points to”. This is where you want the DNS record to send traffic to. Typically this will either be a URL, also known as a CNAME, or an IP address of the web host you’re using. In our example we see that our @ record is pointed to an IP address, which is the IP for the install associated with our WP Engine account.
Sometimes, you will see a relational destination, which is a record pointing to another record. For example, here we see our www record pointing to our @ record. This means that when a visitor goes to www.mydomain.com it redirects to whatever your @ record is, which in our example is our WP Engine IP address.
Finally, you will see TTL. This stand for “Time to Live” and essentially means how often do you want to keep the internet updated to new DNS changes. When updating your DNS, you will want to have the TTL set to a low value. Once your DNS appears to be propagated, you will want to change your TTL to a higher value.
If you have any further questions we’d highly recommend you reach out to your DNS Provider’s support team as they will be the most familiar with their platform. Thanks for watching!