Surprisingly, many of our clients come to us with their domains not setup properly.

If you’re wondering how to do this, there are two main things to consider on your domain.

2 Things to Consider Regarding Your Domain

1. Not super important who you choose to register with, but whoever that is, make sure they have auto-renew of your domain. We’ve had clients where this has NOT happened and while the service emails them, the email goes into the client’s spam folder and eventually the domain expires. Once it expires, you run into the danger of not being able to use it again since someone can nab it from you.

• Our maintenance services monitor your site’s uptime for you and because of this, we’ve automatically detected when this happened (it has happened to two clients), and we’ve texted/called immediately.

2. Use the same registrar for all of your domains; makes it easy on you.

For your domain, you will almost always want to use the nameservers from your domain registrar such as Godaddy or Namecheap.

We won’t talk about what that is here; if you want to read more about it, go to https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/766/10/what-is-dns-server-name-server

What we will talk about is how you should set it up.

There are three steps to this:

STEP 1: As previously mentioned you’ll want to use the nameservers provided by your domain registrar so that you can keep your mail provider and your website hosting provider separate.

Why is this important?

Because in case you want to switch one or the other, they are not tied together by the same company, and if that company has issues or problems or just stops responding to you, both your emails AND your website could be in trouble!

You don’t want to be beholden to any one provider in your business, especially when it comes to those two fundamental online tools: email and your website.
Keeping your nameserver at your domain registrar allows you to go back in at any time and adjust the records associated with your email and your website.

Here’s an example from Godaddy, notice in the list of domains you’d want to click on “DNS” (see hashtagdave.com)

Once you click on it if your screen then looks like the below, it means your nameservers are managed by someone else, and this isn’t what you want:

What you do want is something like we have with this domain, and of course, you’d want mail records with it:

Notice here you can be in control of every aspect of your domain, meaning you can have the A records point to wherever you’re having your website hosted (hopefully a server provided by Pro Website Creators!) and your mail records point to whoever is providing your mail services such as Google, Microsoft, outlook, etc.

If you are in total control of your domain records, then you can keep everything separate, have optimized providers for your email and website, and ultimately maintain control of your online presence.

STEP 2: Your A records should point to your website host’s IP address. The company that does this will take care of editing those records for you, or you can do it yourself.

STEP 3: Your MX records that will control where your email goes.

STEP 4: Additional records as required to ensure emails coming from your website don’t go into spam.

• make sure your website hosting company has a solution for this.