I've gotten downright tired of moving my site again
and again. It seems there are no competent hosting
companies anywhere on the planet. I don't ask for
much. In addition to the usual features for a paid
web host, I just want my site to be up and relatively
quick. Downtime should be measured in hours per year,
and at it's slowest the site should respond in less
than half a second.
So far I haven't found a single hosting company that
even comes close. I've tried about a dozen different
firms, and they've all come up short. In fact, the
most important rule of any web host is violated on
a regular basis time and again. The sites are down
and very slow. Virtually anything else can be tolerated,
except for downtime.
Finally I sat back one day and thought long and hard
about my options. I was getting very frustrated with
my current hosting company because the server was
timing out on occasion, causing my sites to become
unavailable for a few minutes here and a few minutes
there.
I started looking for hosts and saw a word that caught
my eye. The word was "dedicated". Now that
was a thought - a whole machine all to myself. There
was some appeal to that thought, but the price was
too high, or at least I thought so at the time.
Looking closer into the concept, I found a dedicated
hosting service that was actually reasonably priced.
For a couple of hundred dollars a month I had a web
and mail server all to myself. Yes, I know that sounds
high when compared to a shared hosting service, but
remember this included an incredible amount of bandwidth,
lots of disk space and plenty of power.
I paid for the first month and soon discovered the
server had it's own name server software. This meant
I no longer had to deal with an ISP for name server
services.
What's so good about that? Well, as an example, some
time ago I wanted to install Bigmailbox on a site.
This would have allowed my visitors to have a mailbox
named "theirname@renaissancefaire.org".
I thought this would be a pretty cool service to offer
my visitors.
The ISP would not make the change necessary to install
this feature. The change requires about 1 minute,
yet they would not do it. Not even for a charge. With
access to my own name server I could have made this
change myself. It's very simple really. Just a one
line modification.
Another thing I wanted to do on occasion is create
subdomains. For example, wallpaper.renaissancefaire.org.
This would allow me to create sites within sites in
a logical, easy to remember format.
Most of my previous ISPs would not allow me to make
these changes. One of them wanted to charge $10 per
change. Ten dollars for a one minute modification.
Now I can do this kind of thing myself, as often as
I want.
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 the nameserver. Now I can
make these changes myself.
But a problem soon introduced itself. You see, the
name server is actually entered into the domain definition
at the domain registrar. This more or less informs
the 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 the same machine, then that redundancy does not
exist.
I needed another name server somewhere else on the
internet. A little searching and I found one.
http://soa.granitecanyon.com/
This is a free service which allows people with exactly
the same problem that I was facing to create their
own name server entries. You simply enter the domain
name, your email address and the raw DNS server table
for the domain. These DNS server tables are a little
tricky to set up, but the 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 the 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 the 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 the registrar a couple of days later to use those
entries. Theoretically this should work fine.
What is the 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.
