Domain Name System (DNS) Basics

A domain name is your identity on the internet and the domain name system (DNS) keeps track of all the domains on the internet, like a phonebook. Here’s a couple of basics to get you started!

Register a domain name

A domain name serves as your identity on the web, and is the address a person types into their browser to pull up your website. For example, getflywheel.com.

Domain name registration is the process by which you reserve your own domain name on the internet for a chosen period of time, usually one year or more. Most people purchase domain name before their website is even ready.

Once your domain name is registered, you’ll be able to “point” the domain to your Flywheel site using the control panel provided by the domain registrar. Then, when visitors arrive at your domain name, the site you’ve created on Flywheel will load in their browser.

Each site on Flywheel is provided with a temporary domain ending in flywheelsites.com or mysites.io. This domain is meant for use during development and shouldn’t be the long-term URL for your site. Learn more.

Can you register a domain for me?

Flywheel doesn’t offer domain name registration at this time, but luckily there are a number of great registrars out there. We suggest:

• GoDaddy (supports Domain Connect)
• Cloudflare (supports Domain Connect)
• Hover

Time To Live (TTL)

If your domain registrar allows you to enter a value for TTL either for individual records or for all records at once, here’s a quick guide on what that value means.

TTL stands for “Time to Live” is how long your domain registrar should wait before it refreshes your record(s) and publishes any changes that have been made.  This value is usually measured in seconds unless otherwise specified.

Let’s say you want to take a new site live on Flywheel, so you pop open your DNS editor and the records look something like this:

That TTL value tells us a few things:

• It might be up to 24 hours (86,400 seconds) before your records are checked again, depending on when your registrar last refreshed these records
• If you were to make changes now, it could be up to 24 hours before you see these changes go live
• Even if you edit the TTL to a lower number, this rule about how often this record is updated itself might not get updated until the clock runs down on the old 24-hour TTL value. Some registrars will force its records to update immediately when you make changes but to be on the safe side, assume that your records won’t change until the old TTL has expired.

Speeding up DNS edits

As always, if you have any issues at all, feel free to contact Flywheel with a screenshot of your current DNS settings.

Wait, why would I ever want a long TTL?

Great question! When your record is being frequently updated, it effectively means that services are deleting information about where your domain lives from their system after the TTL window of time passes.

The next person trying to visit your domain after it has been cleared from the cache will have to wait for servers to reach out to your registrar for updated information.  This request typically happens in a tiny fraction of a second and is generally undetectable. However, that is, in fact, extra time added to the page load-time clock that wouldn’t be there if your DNS service was told to hang onto your records for a longer period of time.

If you want to shave off some page loading time for some visitors, you can bump that TTL value back up when you know that you won’t be switching up servers any time in the near future.

Check DNS Records

There are a few situations where you might want to verify the IP address your domain’s DNS records are pointing to. For example, this is important when you’re taking your site live on Flywheel for the first time.

The easiest way to confirm this information is to use an online DNS checker tool, such as:

• What’s My DNS
• DNS Check
• Leaf DNS

How to use a DNS checker

1. Open one of the tools above
2. Enter the domain
3. If required, specify the DNS record type (usually A or CNAME)

The DNS checker will return the IP address the domain points to. If this matches the IP address on your site’s dashboard, you should be good to go!

Need help?

If you have any questions our Happiness Engineers are here to help!