Setting up

Introduction

After finishing University, I came to realise that I was actually involving myself in most of what I learned in the Advanced Networking module, namely the DNS section of it. Thus began the rabbit hole, where I wanted to take more control over the domain that I was using to host my website zainezq.com.

I purchased the domain name at the end of 2024, right before new years, for around £10. At the time I was hosting the website mentioned above using Vercel and the domain name was bought through them, so essentially I didn’t have to even do anything beside push to GitHub. The issue was that I had no idea how any of this was working, all I did was git push and the rest was magic. Thus, I wanted more control over what I was doing.

From Vercel to Netlify

The first step in this was to move my projects away from Vercel, for ethical purposes. I switched over to Netlify, which I found to be a very similar experience to Vercel, but with a few more tweaks in setting up. One thing I had to do was create a netlify.toml file where it would handle the configurations of the build. I ran into an issue as I was changing the build script on the dashboard, and at the same time handling the _redirects and build configuration in the netlify.toml file. To fix this, all I did was keep the build configuration as it was on the project dashboard, but remove the one on the netlify.toml file. After this, the project built successfully.

The build script was node -r dotenv/config mynode.js && ng build

From Netlify to Cloudflare

I only realised after that Netlify didn’t have web analytics and there were limitations on build minutes and bandwidth, thus I then switched from Netlify to Cloudflare. The actual switching over was quite smooth as I kept the _redirects file, removed the netlify.toml file and used the UI to configure the build script. The only thing that needed changing was setting the minimum node.js version to be at least 20 and the build command to be node -r dotenv/config mynode.js && npx ng build.

DNS Configuration

In terms of the DNS management, this took a while to configure, and was one of the reasons I kept switching hosting services. I originally used Vercel, and purchased the domain name through them (a third party registrar I presume), however, the first change (Vercel → Netlify) was warranted because of ethical concerns, which made me want to change the registrar specifically (although I changed the hosting service as well). So I decided to use Krystal.io as my registrar, which I found to be quite nice and easy to set up. In order to transfer the domain name, I had to get the EPP code (also known as the Auth-Code) from Vercel. After propagation, the transfer was complete. The issue with using this registrar, though, was that I was trying to use this as my DNS manager as well, where I create records and manage them, but even after adding the Netlify nameservers to the domain name, I couldn’t get it to work. So what I decided to do was to use Krystal.io as my registrar, and Cloudflare as the DNS manager, this way, I added the nameservers that Netlify provided to the DNS records managed by Cloudflare and set up the other records (more on this below), and it worked! Following this, the change from Netlify to Cloudflare in terms of hosting was quite smooth. All I needed to change was the nameservers, A records and CNAME records, and it worked straight away.

DNS Records

The DNS records I used were:

Record Name	Description
A	I had two of these, with their names as ”*”, which refers to the wildcard value. In other words, The record of type A with the name *.zainezq.com has the value(s) of the IP address(es) given by Cloudflare
CNAME	The record of type CNAME with the name zainezq.com has the value of the the domain name for the website given by Cloudflare. I had another two CNAME records, one with the name www which was useful as it I wanted both www.zainezq.com and zainezq.com to point to the same website. I further had one more CNAME record which was used for a subdomain, namely garden. This points to this website!
SOA	This was automatically generated for me, and assigned a Primary NS (one of the that was given) to it as well as the Responsible Email
NS	Two nameservers given by Cloudflare

Some Useful Commands

One of the commands I used when checking information about the DNS records was dig.

dig example.com A        # IPv4 address
dig example.com AAAA     # IPv6 address
dig example.com MX       # Mail server
dig example.com NS       # Name servers
dig example.com TXT      # Text records (e.g., SPF, verification)
dig example.com CNAME    # Canonical name
dig example.com +short    # More concise output

Another one was nslookup, although this was less useful than dig.

nslookup example.com

One final one I used was whois which I used to get information about the registrar of the domain name.

whois example.com

Summary

This was a very fun thing to do, as I was able to use the knowledge I had from the Advanced Networking module to configure the DNS records for my website.