For the past couple of days instead of working on actual development work related to any of my projects, I’ve been transferring all of my domains from DreamHost, my old hosting provider to a new DNS provider. I was looking forward to a gentle switch over, to my new Canadian (eh!) DNS provider easyDNS. Unfortunately like many technical problems, I ended up spending more time and effort than I expected to originally. (Enough effort that I’m late with posting this blog update today.)

It turned out that DreamHost made enabling my desired setup real easy, and hid a lot of the technical difficulties of setting up DNS records. easyDNS is a lot more flexible, but then I’m not a DNS record expert so getting a similar setup was tricky. Fortunately the fine folks at easyDNS are really responsive by email, and a few emails back and forth we arrived at a setup that worked nicely. Most of this came down to not understanding the terminology and not checking the right places

DNS Record Terminology

A

This the main record that maps a domain name to an actual IP (v4 and v6) address. In my case this would be the IP address of the server hosting all my webapps.

my_domain.com ---> 123.456.789.10 (not a real IP that I own)

CNAME

Canonical Name or Alias, this is used to map a subdomain (e.g. www, app, etc.) to another part of the domain or another top-level address. This retains the subdomain name in the address bar of your browser.

www.my_domain.com ---> mydomain,com
mail.my_domain.com ---> my_email_provider.net

URL Redirect

Redirects (usually via a HTTP 301 Redirect) an address to another domain or location. (This turned out to be the option I needed for most of my sites) A redirect naturally will change the URL in the browser’s address bar.

my_domain.ca ---> http://my_domain.com/
my_nifty_sideproject.net ---> http://side_project.github.io/landing/

Stealth Redirect (easyDNS specific)

Redirecting using an IFRAME, and retains the original address in the browser. Otherwise it works like a URL redirect, it just won’t look like one.

A Working Setup

My original setup at DreamHost basically pointed all my additional domains at my main domain, and removed the www subdomain that normally gets tacked on to an URL by browsers.

dorianpula.com -> dorianpula.ca
www.dorianpula.ca -> dorianpula.ca

Now traditionally you are supposed to use a CNAME for the second example. I just ended up using a URL redirects everywhere to make things simple. And a A DNS record for the main top-level domain to point to my Linode servers.

Check Your Nameservers!!!

The setup turned out real simple, but at first I could not get any of my changes to work. Or rather some of them works, other did not. It was very frustrating at first, but then the easyDNS support rep pointed out that I had not updated my nameservers for some of the domains names I transferred over. I was originally pointing to DreamHost’s rather than easyDNS’s nameservers and my changes simply were not propagating through. Once I fixed that, everything started updating as expected.

Provider Recommendations

Finally I just want to make some recommendations for anyone looking for a hosting or domain provider. I started off using DreamHost, after migrating away from GoDaddy, and I was happy with them for the longest time. They are convenient, easy to setup especially for PHP apps and pretty supportive. I highly recommend them if you have a normal website (like a WordPress blog) and want to have one stop shop.

Personally I outgrew DreamHost, when I needed something more configurable for my Python webapps. I’ve since migrated to Linode, who provide very nice, configurable and affordable VPS (virtual private server) hosting. I love using them and they support a wide variety of different OS platforms and versions.

Finally I recommend easyDNS. Their great for Canadians, supportive and care about your Internet freedoms (their takedown policy is that you have to have a real court-order or being doing something blatantly illegal rather than some flimsy takedown letter from some random legal department). I really recommend them if you want a flexible DNS/domain hosting. The problems I encountered were my own doing and lack of understanding, that the support rep helped me resolve in a few hours and after few tries.