DNS (Domain Name System)

DNS is the system that maps a human-readable name such as example.com to the IP address a server uses. Without it, you would type numbers like 203.0.113.10 to reach a site. In hosting, DNS decides which server receives requests for your domain, while the site files stay on the host.

Three layers people mix up

Three separate roles are often treated as one. You buy the domain name at a registrar. Nameservers decide who holds and answers for the DNS zone. The record values inside that zone, such as A, AAAA, and MX, hold the actual directions.

So adding an A record on a new host's panel does nothing public if the nameservers still point at the old provider. Fix who owns the zone first, then edit records. A domain can live at registrar A, run DNS at a service like Cloudflare, and host files at C, as long as the records stay consistent.

The records you touch most

A standard site needs an A or CNAME, whichever the host documents, plus MX and TXT if it uses domain email. In cPanel you edit these under Domains, then Zone Editor. Each type is covered in DNS Records.

TTL and caching

TTL (time to live) tells resolvers how long to keep a record before asking again. Common values: 300 seconds right before a change, 3600 for normal operation, 86400 for records that rarely move. Lower the TTL a day before a migration, not after, because the TTL change itself has to propagate. After you move hosts, some visitors keep seeing the old IP until their resolver cache expires, which is what domain propagation explains.

What breaks during a move

Do not touch MX records when you only move the web, because mail can break while the site already works. A safe hosting migration keeps mail records pointed at the right mail server. If the site sits behind a proxy, visitors see the proxy IP rather than the raw origin, so test from outside it too. Subdomains like www, mail, and staging need their own records and do not inherit automatically from the root.

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