Ledfrog.com » dns

Building an Online Business – Site Creation

Brandon Hann — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 01:55:47 +0000

Site creation is probably the most important step in starting your online business. Without a functioning website, you’re not going to get very far. However, creating your site doesn’t have to be a difficult process and it’s certainly not something you want to spend all your resources and time on. For example, you can make a website yourself, but spend countless hours trying to get everything to work and look right or you hire a design firm to do it in a fraction of the time, but spend thousands of dollars in the process.

You want to find that happy medium. Today, the most popular form of creating a website is to build a blog. A blog is a very simplistic approach to posting information online–after all, the term ‘blog’ simply means web-log. Blogs are used for all sorts of sites ranging from personal to technical, political to fanatical and everything in between. It’s only in recent years that businesses have begun to harness the power of blogs.

So how do you build one? Well, fortunately, you don’t have to! There is already software out there that has done it for you. All you have to do is get the core structure in place and fill it up with content. This type of software is referred to as a Content Management System (CMS).

Of course, you don’t have to use a CMS for your site, but it will save you TONS of time and possibly LOTS of money! Since this section is all-encompassing, you will still find it useful–simply skip the CMS portion.

Site Creation

The order of this list is a rough estimate of how you should proceed, but as some areas are more advanced than others, you can continue as you see fit. For the sake of publishing this online, not every section will be available at once.

If you don’t want to keep coming back for updates, sign up to get my newsletter and you’ll receive this entire section when it’s completed.

Site Creation – Domain Name System (DNS)

Brandon Hann — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 01:22:43 +0000

Understanding the Domain Name System, or DNS is an important part of understanding web hosting as well as the Internet in general. Without it, we wouldn’t have domains and the Internet would not be what it is today. You may not have known it, but underneath the entire infrastructure, lies DNS.

What does it do?

In short, DNS takes domain names such as Ledfrog.com and translates them into an IP address like: 205.186.139.27. Imagine if you had to remember how to find websites based on their IP address? Even if you did, imagine what would happen if that website changed its physical location, thereby changing the IP address? DNS was created to bypass these problems and allow for the creation of what I call aliases that are understandable to humans.

How does it work?

When you register a domain name, you’re placing a record in the domain registry that tells the Internet how to find your website. If someone types in Ledfrog.com, this is what happens:

Your computer asks your ISP (Verizon, Time Warner, AOL, etc.) if it knows what and where Ledfrog.com is.
If your ISP doesn’t know, it asks the Top Level Domain server. In this case it’s .com and of course .com knows that there is an entry for “ledfrog”.
It returns the IP address of the server that Ledfrog is located on and tells your computer where to connect.
Your web browser then connects to the IP address and you now see the website on your screen.

Of course, that’s a very basic look at the process because there are thousands of DNS servers out on the Internet that do search queries to help with the processing of domain names.

How does this apply to me?

Once you register your domain name, you need to point it the name servers of the web host you’ve chosen to host your site. As an example, the name servers for my site are: NS1.MEDIATEMPLE.NET and NS2.MEDIATEMPLE.NET because MediaTemple.net hosts my site. Those nameservers are responsible for telling the world that my website is located there and to display it to everyone who asks for it.

Another main advantage to DNS is the ability to change your web host at any time. Since the web host isn’t going anywhere, their IP addresses will never change. If your site moves, your nameservers change and therefore get updated with the new IP addresses. Because you have a registered domain name, there’s nothing more you have to do once you update your nameservers.

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Get your ip even when DNS is down

Brandon Hann — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 08:31:06 +0000

I’ve come across this problem many times before where I’ll be fixing a computer and the internet works when using ip addresses but not hostnames. This is likely caused by a downed DNS server or incorrect settings. This post is more for my information, but it may serve someone in the future.

To get your public ip address without having to type in whatismyipaddress.com, just go to: http://140.239.191.10/. You’ll see a blank screen that just shows your ip address.

For testing purposes on a Windows machine, if you need to ping Google, use one of their ip addresses:

72.14.207.99
216.239.51.104
64.233.167.99

Also, as a quick check, make sure that the DNS service is running if you’re not on a corporate network (or any network where there’s a DNS server): type in services.msc into the Run command and check for DNS to make sure it’s started.