Chris Salmon Technologies

OK so following along the list outlined in the first article in this series, I went to GoDaddy (where I'm a bulk purchaser and seller of domains) and found that lisabyrdsclass.com was not taken.  So I registered that domain.  I also registered for an SSL certificate for the domain.

Then, and this is important - if you host your own nameservers, like we have since 1995, you need to point the name service for the domain to your nameservers.  This gives you total control over the domain - the registrar at that point is ONLY a registrar and nothing more.  We can then customize name service for the domain in whatever way we choose, send different subdomains here and there, send mail here or there, do whatever we like.  SO - during the registration process, the name servers were set to ns.cyberstation.net and ns2.cyberstation.net - our name servers.

To briefly explain, name service is what converts human readable names, like lisabyrdsclass.com to the actual IP number of the machine that hosts the website.  All actual traffic and communication is really based on the IP numbers, as a computer doesn't know anything but 0's and 1's when you get right down to it.  The domains, names, website URL's, etc., are all mapped onto the real world of IP numbers by the Domain Name Service, or DNS for short.  When you go to a website, like lisabyrdsclass.com - your machine sends a query to it's DNS server (most likely that of your ISP) basically asking "what IP number is lisabyrdsclass.com?"  A registrar, like GoDaddy, has access to the top-level domains (TLD's) like the .com domain, and queries for a .com name that are registered to it are sent to GoDaddy.  By setting the namer server for Lisa's domain to my nameservers, when GoDaddy recieves a request for lisabyrdsclass in it's .com domain, it replies "don't ask me!  Ask ns.cyberstation.net or ns2.cyberstation.net !!"  My servers are queried, the IP number is returned, and your machine from that point on is talking to the IP number for lisabyrdsclass.com.  And thus, we have total control over the various names and aspects of the domain.

Setting the name servers of Lisa's domains to my machines introduces a very slight delay in getting the new domain operating, as GoDaddy must make an internal change to point away from it's own name servers to ours.  In the meantime, we will need to set up proper domain name records on our primary DNS server (ns) for her new domain, and copy them to the secondary nameserver (ns2) for redundancy.  We'll need to find an available IP number we want to use and point www.lisabyrdsclass.com to that IP number. That IP number will be physically given to a server which will answer at that address.

Let's proceed with that ... <to be continued> ....