What are best practices for domain name, DNS and web hosting?

Setting up your domain, DNS, and web hosting correctly ensures fast, secure and reliable website performance.

Once you have this set up with good quality providers, you will rarely need to make changes and can enjoy great performance.

However, if you do not have this set up correctly, then it can cause problems with a slow-loading websites, security vulnerabilities and can increase the time and cost of ongoing maintenance.

What are domains, DNS and web hosting?

Knowing what the differences are will help to make sure you systems are set up in a simple and easy to manage way.

Here's a simple guide to domains, DNS and hosting:

  1. Domain: It's like your online address. Just as a house has a street address, your domain is where people find you on the internet.
  2. DNS: Think of it as the GPS for the internet. It directs people from your domain name to the actual computer where your website lives.
  3. Web Hosting: This is the actual computer, called a server, where your website files are stored. It's like the land where your "online house" sits.
  4. Email Hosting: This is your professional business email. This is like the postal service that delivers your letters to and from your address.
  5. SMTP Email: This is email sent specifically from your web host. This is different to email hosting in that it is typically automatic and transactional messages, such as lost passwords for website user accounts.

The below covers our recommended set up for domain, DNS and web hosting.

Our recommended domain, DNS and web hosting set-up

Here's the set up we provide and recommend for our clients:

Buying a domain name in Australia

If you're in Australia, we recommend buying the .com.au for your business name. You'll need to have your ABN in order to qualify.

To buy a domain name in Australia, we recommend the following providers:

  • Crazy Domains
  • Namecheap
  • VentraIP

When you purchase your domain name, it's important to check the box for "automatic renewal" because if you do not renew your domain name then someone else could purchase it and it can be a very difficult and expensive process to get it back.

Recommended DNS set up in Australia

Your DNS are your Domain Name Servers. This is a system that points your domain name to a particular location on the web. It's similar to how your address points to a particular location on the map.

We recommend the following DNS provider:

Benefits of CloudFlare for DNS:

  • Fast DNS loading time (means faster website and better for your customers)
  • Changing DNS records take seconds, instead of hours (means easier management and less risk)

Recommended web hosting in Australia

A fast-loading website is important to give a great experience for your website visitors and give you an SEO boost in Google.

To get the best results and the fastest website speeds, having your web server close to where most of your customers are is important.

We provide fast-loading Australian-based web servers for our Australian clients through our web hosting partners. The benefit of hosting directly with our team is that if there's an issue with your web hosting, we will handle it on your behalf.

Here are the Australian web hosting servers that we recommend:

  • Flywheel
  • WP Engine
  • Cloudways
  • Kinsta
  • VentraIP

Overall, if you want to have a fast-loading website that helps you perform better in Google and gets more conversions, then you need to make sure your domain, DNS and web hosting are set up properly.

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