Welcome to Episode 7 of Ask Paulie Anything.
Today, I’m going to answer a part of the question about what services we use for our business. I’m also going to touch upon the Cloudflare service and discuss the best thing you can do for your domain.
[0:38] – Web Hosting & The DNS Silo
What I want to talk about is a principle that I touched upon in a blog article earlier last year was about siloing – siloing your web services.
In the past, web hosting was very cheap. What had happened was, people would get a web server or reseller hosting, and then they would put everything on it. That is:
- host your website;
- host your email;
- your DNS would be on there;
- your databases would be on there;
- … anything you can think of would be all on that 1 server.
That’s OK if you’re on a budget, it’s just easier to manage because everything is in 1 place.
But, what that creates for you is a huge single point of failure. If that server has any problems, all those services go offline: your email, your DNS, your website… everything, will be affected.
What Can You Do To Mitigate This Risk?
One of the most important aspects of any domain name is the DNS – Domain Name Service.
Nearly every single web request, ever, looks up DNS and says “where is the server, where should I look to to find this server?”.
DNS lets your browser find a website by using easy-to-remember URLs, or you find out where you should deliver your email to, for a particular domain.
If your DNS is on the server that is doing 101 different things, or it’s on a server that’s not quite reliable, or it’s on a server that’s doing anything else, then your DNS is not as optimised as it needs to be.
[2:00] – What Is The Best Thing You Can Do For Your Domain?
The first thing we do when we purchase a domain name is we put it on a Cloudflare. That gives us the fastest, most highly reliable DNS service you can get, at any price. And this price is free.
I’m not just recommending it to you because it’s free, but because it’s the best. After years of using it, we’ve not had a single problem. And independent results show that it’s the fastest DNS lookup service in the world.
In another episode, I’ll get into more details about Cloudflare, and also about some other services that we use. But, what I’d like to recommend to you now, is to give a look at what they offer in their free service.
Don’t worry about anything else, if it’s all a little bit confusing or you don’t really know what the point of CloudFlare is. Getting your DNS on CloudFlare makes your DNS reliable, makes whatever services you run on your domain name (email, your website, or anything else) much more reliable.
There’s nothing to lose, and it’s completely free.
Thank You! Comments, Questions?
If you have any questions about this, drop me a line, or if you have your own question, feel free to use the link below.
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