Continued from page 1
Another change that I've wanted to make also involved subdomains, but with a twist. I wanted to create a subdomain of search.renaissancefaire.org which called up a search engine on everyone.net. My old ISPs would not make this change - not one of them. Yet it was a simple one line entry in
nameserver. Now I can make these changes myself.
But a problem soon introduced itself. You see, name server is actually entered into domain definition at domain registrar. This more or less informs internet where to find your site, email server, subdomains and so on.
Registrars require at least two name servers. My site only had one. I could have defined two by asking my dedicated hosting company for another IP address, but this had a problem. The reason for requiring two name servers is redundancy. If both IP addresses are on same machine, then that redundancy does not exist.
I needed another name server somewhere else on internet. A little searching and I found one.
http://soa.granitecanyon.com/
This is a free service which allows people with exactly same problem that I was facing to create their own name server entries. You simply enter domain name, your email address and raw DNS server table for domain. These DNS server tables are a little tricky to set up, but service provides excellent documentation and will not allow an invalid entry to be set up.
So what do you do? You create your entries at this service, then modify your domain at registrar to use them (wait a couple of days after defining them, however).
I believe you can use this service even if you host your site on a normal shared host (and possibly even a free host). You would need to set up your site normally and get ISP to set up their name servers as appropriate. Once that was done, you could go to granitecanyon.com and define your own name server entries, then proceed to registrar a couple of days later to use those entries. Theoretically this should work fine.
What is bottom line? If you are using a dedicated host or you want to gain some measure of control over your name servers, you can now do so. This will enable you to do what you need without paying high costs or begging your ISP for a favor.
To see a list of article available for reprint, you can send an email to: mailto:article-list@internet-tips.net?subject=send_article_list or visit http://internet-tips.net/requestarticles.htm
Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets at http://www.internet-tips.net - Visit our website any time to read over 1,000 complete FREE articles about how to improve your internet profits, enjoyment and knowledge.
