King Of My Castle, Master Of My Domain Name

I am working on converting a client’s site to WordPress. We’ve got it almost ready to go. We’re moving it from one hosting service to another. In order to make the change to the new web host, we have to make a DNS change.

The problem is that the current hosting company controls the DNS. We have to give them a one day notice to make the change. Instead of going live Friday night, we have to wait until Monday.

The moral of the story is that if you own your own domain name, you need to understand the technical issues involved and you need to know enough that you have control of it.

Maybe you don’t like keys and you’re not a locksmith, but you have a key to the front door of your house, right? Maybe you’re not a mechanic, but you like to drive your car, don’t you?

Here’s an overview of how it all works, in simple language.

A web server is just a computer that responds to requests for web pages.

It can also be referred to as a “web host”. You rent space on a web hosting company’s servers to put your web site on.

Each web server/computer has an IP address. That’s a technical number that uniquely identifies it among all the computers in the universe.

Every computer on the Internet has an IP address assigned to it. You may not know this, but your computer has an IP address associated with it.

IP addresses are the actual way that computers, servers, talk to each other on the Internet. It is the language of the Internet for computers.

Problem is that humans don’t remember those IP addresses very easily. We developed domain names to be easier for people to read and remember.

Domain names are just a convenience for people.

The next problem is tying the domain name to the IP address. We need something like a phone book. I know I want Joe’s Pizza, but what is their phone number?

Let’s look it up in the phone book. If the phone book says it’s 555-1234, then everyone calls 555-1234. If Joe’s Pizza were to move and get a new phone number, then the phone book would have to change to reflect that, right? If they change the phone book so it says that it’s 555-5678, then everyone calls 555-5678.

That’s easy, right?

Well, the system that manages these pointers or associations with domain names and IP addresses is called a DNS, domain name server. The “name server” is actually a computer, a server, that will tell you what IP address is associated with what domain name. You can ask it where is “www.walton.com” and it will tell you it’s at “76.246.231.1″, which happens to be the IP address of my web server/computer.

It’s just like a phone book for web sites.

What happens is that you type in a domain name into your web browser, IE or Firefox or whatever. When you press enter, your computer tries to figure out what IP address that domain name is located at. It asks a DNS. It gets the IP address back from the DNS, then it goes and asks the server, computer at that DNS for the web page. It’s a two step process. Once it gets the IP address, it remembers it for a while, so it doesn’t have to ask again for a while.

From all of this, you see the whoever owns the DNS, owns the world, or at least your web site. It’s all about control.

Log into where you registered your domain name and see if there is a place to make changes to the DNS. If you have a hosting company manage it for you, see if there’s a place in the admin pages to make changes.

You don’t have to know all the details about how to do it, but you should have access to it.

I’m a nice guy and I’ve registered domain names for clients in my own name just to save them the technical difficulties. They just wanted to pay me and have it done with. That’s fine. I’ll do everything I can for my clients.

I’ve heard of other people having trouble with having access and control.

I know it’s a convenience/knowledge vs access/control issue. I know you just don’t want to deal with it. But you should at least know how to do it.

The more you rely on other people, the less control you have.

You should at least be able to log in and make changes yourself if you want to.

If you can’t do that, then you don’t have control of your domain name or your web site.