Getting Your DNS Settings Right

Development

One thing worth thinking about in 2008, is fixing the DNS entry to your website. Most here are probably set up just fine, but here’s one of the most common problems we see:

Go to a website – eg, http://www.marketsafeuk.com and it should all work fine.

But take out the www and go to http://marketsafeuk.com and it doesn’t.  You just get a time out as the DNS fails to resolve the request.

This happens on a remarkable number of sites, even those belonging to some web designers. And it’s poor because a lot of users have got used to not typing the www subdomain to many addresses. They expect the null subdomain to point to the normal website. How many customers would Amazon miss out on if going to amazon.co.uk didn’t work? Lots….

So – if your site experiences this problem go into your domain’s control panel and set up a new A record where the subdomain is left uncompleted. The ip address should be the same as your usual one. Most control panels should allow this.

Your webserver, in most cases, will be set up by default to serve a blank subdomain the same way as the www one. If not, you may need to talk to your hosts about resolving this.

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