If you want a startup/side-project idea, here it is. I can tell you from 10+ years in website hosting and maintenance that most laypeople, designers, marketers, and even some technical people will <i>never</i> understand DNS. (and they shouldn't have to)<p>A small business wants a website at SquareSpace, cloudflare CDN, email at Google Apps, landing pages on a subdomain with Unbounce, their blog on yet another subdomain, and DKIM/SPF records for the email newsletter system.<p>Setting this up is not easy for most people. Most people aren't even sure <i>where</i> to do it–let alone <i>how</i> to do it. (is your registrar handling your DNS? sometimes ...)<p>If you had a 1 or 2-click tool that setup these for people, maybe wrapped it around some domain search/affiliate tools, I think you could make some money.<p>My 2¢
<i>"Email is so important to the functioning of the Internet that it gets its own record type."</i><p>Well that is one way of looking at it. Probably the appropriate way if you're teaching, but if you want to be critical then it reeks of poor design for a particular service to get special treatment by a fundamental part of the internet. It isn't that MX records aren't needed. They just shouldn't only be useful for email.
'This is why you can't have a CNAME on a root domain like petekeen.net, because you generally have to have other records for that domain like MX'<p>While in theory that's common, the primary reason is because of the SOA record that must exist.
Learning networking/tcp/dns has been a pain for me for years. I can never wrap my head around it properly despite many attempts.<p>I blame it on not having easy access to throwaway playgrounds.<p>I recently found this project <a href="http://mininet.org/" rel="nofollow">http://mininet.org/</a> which promises throwaway network playgrounds. Hopefully it will help me finally learn networks for good.
<i>Almost always you'll want to redirect a bare domain like iskettlemanstillopen.com to www.iskettlemanstillopen.com. Registrars like Namecheap and DNSimple call this a URL Redirect. In Namecheap you would set up a URL Redirect like this...</i><p>I prefer my domains to be naked (as opposed to www.), but I typically redirect all www-traffic in my web server (NGINX). Is this the wrong approach?
OpenNIC is a user controlled Network Information Center offering a democratic and non-national alternative to the traditional Top-Level Domain registries. <a href="http://wiki.opennicproject.org/HomePage" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.opennicproject.org/HomePage</a>
This is also a nice overview from the dnsimple guys:<p><a href="https://howdns.works/ep1/" rel="nofollow">https://howdns.works/ep1/</a>
Anyone tried the "new" namecheap custom dns settings? Like glueing nameservers?<p>Its one of the poorest interfaces ever created in the history of mankind.