Development of Personal Site: Part 2 (Domain Name)
In this post I am going to describe process of choosing domain name, registering it and making it to be resolved to static IP address of my VPS server. I ran into some problems when was doing these tasks and want to describe these issues along with their solutions.
No one in the world really “owns” a domain name except the Network Information Centre, or domain name registry. But if you want to have one, you should register it. There are a lot of companies that offer domain name registration (so called Domain Name Registrars) for affordable price (just search for “register domain name” in google). UnixShell (my VPS provider) doesn’t provide such service, they decided to go true Unix way: do one thing and do it well.
Real problem with registering domain names is that the name you want to have can be already owned by someone. Alas, this was the case with name for our site. Originally we want to call it stepinside.org, but ended with step-inside.org (I also thought about calling it sepinsi.de :).
One thing that turned out to be harder then I expected was to associate my domain name with static IP address of my VPS server, but now I know much more details how DNS works :) And I want to share my knowledge with you.
Originally I though that I would be able to login to the site of my registrar and using web interface configure my domain name to be resolved to my static IP address (i. e. create A-record in terms of DNS). Unfortunately they don’t provide such functionality or I am so dump, that haven’t figured out how to do it using provided web interface (but this means that average user also unable to do it).
Fortunately this task can be solved without help of your domain name registrar. Every domain name has so called WHOIS record. It contains such important information as owner of domain name, details about registrar, registration and expiry date and so on. Your registrar is responsible to maintain this record and you should be able to edit at least some details of WHOIS record of your domain name using web interface.
The most important thing for our task is a list of nameservers that are responsible for resolving domain name. You need to specify list of nameservers that are able to say that your domain name is resolved to certain IP address. For more details you can check very good overview of How DNS works .
You have two possibilities for such nameservers:
- run your own nameserver (such as bind or djbdns)
- use one of free DNS services, like EveryDNS.net
I’ve chosen the second one, because it is much easier :)
Posted by on March 24, 2006 | development, web
Comments
ksh April 14, 2006 at 7:42 p.m.
I am glad to know that I am not alone (with gento at UnixShell :)
To your comment, I agree that EveryDNS is the best option (mostly because it is much easier to setup).
But it doesn't really matter that your own DNS service can go off line when you run all services (like http, mail) on the same server, because the most probable reason of such situation is that the whole server is off line.
Scott April 12, 2006 at 5:30 p.m.
Hi! I am also running a Gentoo VM at Unixshell.
I'll definitely go for external DNS hosting than having it hosted on the same box. In fact I have about half a dozen domains hosted at EveryDNS.net. It is just (1) much less hassle (2) they have more redundancy than you do (3) VPS going off line will only bring down the services but not the DNS resolution.