Getting Seen Online – Domain Names And Your VPS

It’s important that you consider how users will reach your website if you run an online service of any kind. Computers connected to the internet use IP (internet protocol) addresses to identify themselves, and a VPS is no different. These are special numbers which are unique, and only one computer can use a specific IP address at a time. Two types of IP address are currently in common use: IPv4 and IPv6. While IPv4 addresses are mostly memorable, being 4 groups of 3-digit numbers joined with dots, IPv6 addresses contain many letters and numbers punctuated with colons that look like they could pass a number of password complexity checks. The downside of IP addresses is that while you may learn the ones that you use regularly, no one could ever be expected to remember one they read on an advert through their day, for example.

Domain Names, like IP addresses but easier.

To make things easier, Domain Names were invented. The domain name acts as a memorable word or grouping of words that are then used as an alias for an IP address. Domain names are hierarchical and are arranged from right to left starting with the top-level domain, and with subsequent subdomains separated by dots. Originally the top level domains consisted of a number of international domains such as .com and .net, as well as country ones such as .us, .uk, .jp and so on. In recent years, however, a number of new top level domains were introduced, such as .blog, .flowers, .menu and .tattoo. There are a number of rules, such as the characters that are allowed to be used in a domain name, the maximum length of any single subdomain and the maximum length of the full domain name.

Subdomains: more room to grow.

The domain name system makes use of servers called name servers that store the details of domains and subdomains, along with what they point to in records. Different name servers can be used in different ways. Some may be set up as authoritative name servers, which are the nameservers that hold the records for specific domain names that the rest of the servers in the system will check to identify information about those domains.The company that you bought your domain from will normally provide some servers that you can use as authoritative name servers. Alternatively, you can set up your own authoritative name servers. The other use for name servers are caching servers. These servers store records that are fetched from the authoritative name servers and respond to queries from other computers. Your home internet provider will normally provide a set of caching name servers that the computers on your home network will use to resolve domain names to IP addresses.  

Setting up a domain with your VPS.

In order to use a domain with your VPS, you’ll need to set up records for your domain name to point people to VPS. Normally the registrar that you bought your domain from will provide some form of control panel that you can use to manage your domain name’s records on the name servers that they provide. There are various types of domain record, the most common ones being A records which are used to point to an IPv4 address, AAAA records which are used to point to an IPv6 address, and CNAME records which are used to point to another domain name.  
When you set up records for your domain name to work with your VPS, you’ll generally set up an A record for the main domain name to point to the VPS. Any subdomains that also need to point there (such as www.) can then use a CNAME record to point to the main domain name. Let’s look at this scenario: imagine that you have the domain example.com, and you want to point it to your VPS which has the IP 172.16.25.32 so that it responds to website requests for example.com and www.example.com names. You would need to create an A record for example.com with 172.16.25.32 as the destination, and then create a CNAME record for www.example.com with example.com as the destination. With a little bit of research, you can set up a domain on your VPS and be on your way to helping visitors find your website as their destination.

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