DNS Settings for Your Site

DNS (Domain Name System) is the system that connects your domain name with the actual hardware (servers) that host your site. There are a few primary types of records that are most common, A record, CNAME record and MX record. These are all just blocks of text you copy and paste into a form with your DNS provider.

An A record is the IP address where you site is being hosted, and will look like a serious of number divided by periods like 192.186.0.100

A CNAME in CNAME record stands for “Canonical Name record”, and it allows you to point one domain name to another, sort of a like a short-cut. An example of this is common with sub-domains where a 3rd party provides a service like a store. An example of this would be for store.example.com to refer to mystore.ecommerceprovider.com.

Who is your DNS provider?

You can you use any DNS provider you want to, but usually the simplest choice is using the domain name providers DNS services. Here are a few popular examples of how to update your A Record for your domain.

Archetype Media also provides DNS services, currently through Rackspace, but any DNS service will work.

Making a site go live

To make a site go live, your DNS needs to point your domain to the appropriate server. With Archetype, this is based on your reseller account’s IP address.