DNS is the internet’s address book. It is the thing that turns yourbusiness.co.uk into the actual location of your website.
You do not need to understand it to use us. This page is for when something is not working and you want to know what is going on.
The analogy that actually works
A domain name is like a business name in a phone book. DNS is the phone book. The records are the individual entries.
When someone types your domain into a browser, their computer looks it up in the phone book, finds the entry, and goes to the address it gives. That lookup takes milliseconds and happens every time.
The three things worth knowing
A domain is registered. You buy it for a year at a time from a registrar. This is just ownership — the name is yours.
A domain is delegated. Its nameservers say which company runs the address book for it. This is what you change when you point a domain at us.
A domain has records. These are the individual entries: where the website is, where email goes, and various bits of verification.
Registration, delegation and records are three separate things. This is why you can own a domain with one company, have another company run its DNS, and have your website and email in two more places again. It is also why moving one of these things can break another if nobody is paying attention.
Why changes are not instant
Every DNS answer comes with a TTL — how long the answer may be cached before it must be looked up again.
That caching is what makes the internet fast. It also means that when you change a record, computers that already have the old answer keep using it until their copy expires. That is “propagation”, and it is why a change can be live for you and not for your customer in another town.
Usually minutes. Occasionally up to 48 hours. See my domain isn’t working yet.
What we manage for you
Once your domain points at us, we handle everything needed to keep your website online: the address records, the certificate, the www version.
You can see all of it in your dashboard under Domains → DNS, and you can add your own records for things like email or verifying your business with Google.
The two records that point your domain at your website are shown but locked. They are the ones that take your site offline if they are wrong, and “my website disappeared” is a bad way to find out you changed the wrong row.
If one genuinely needs changing, get in touch and we will do it.