Site management

Domain name and DNS management

When your site is ready, you need to move to the domain name selection and configuration and DNS management stage. In this part, we will review the different steps to get your site online. The first step is obviously the choice of the domain name. To purchase one you have to go to a domain name registrar's website (eg Go Daddy) and check the availability of the domain name you have chosen.

What's a domain name ?

For a site to be visible to a user around the world, it should be able to reach the server (computer) that hosts it. This server is actually accessible via an IP address (00.00.000.0000). Since it is unlikely that users will remember the IP address of each website they visit, the domain names come into play and allow a connection between the user and the IP address of the machine that hosts your site through the DNS service.

DNS management

On the configuration side, we must take into account several parameters namely:

The configuration at the registrar (mentioned in the introduction) DNS associated with the domain name: This will allow the DNS.com (or .org, .ca etc) to request the DNS server configured to find the IP address of your site.
The Time To Live (TTL): the cache duration of the DNS configurations in the registrar. This duration can extend up to 24 hours. As a general rule, this value can be modified, but the time taken to make this change into account must be taken into consideration.
The DNS settings out of which the main ones are:
- A : to point a domain name to an IP address
- CNAME (canonical name): which works as an alias
- MX (Mail exchange): this allows you to configure emails by identifying the server that manages the emails for the created domain name.
- TXT: very often used to add parameters to your DNS allowing you to identify yourself to external services.
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DMARC: identify the server that sends emails to avoid being considered spam

Sending emails and spam

When creating a site to prevent emails sent from forms from falling into spam, make the following checks:

Check that the 'SPF' record of the DNS of the domain in question contains the IP address linked to the server at Extenso: to do this, use the following service and enter the domain name in the Hostname box: SPF Check
If the IP address is not configured, request the creation of a subdomain whose DNS MX entry points to the Extenso servers. Thus any email created with this subdomain will be signed and the recipients will be able to identify it.