I just bought a domain. What now?

Every live domain has an authoritative DNS service provider delegated to it to ensure its availability throughout the Internet.

After you purchase your domain, you will have to choose an authoritative DNS service provider, delegate authoritative name servers to your domain and finally, import your DNS records into your DNS service provider.  

1. Choosing an authoritative DNS service provider 

After you purchase a domain, you must choose an authoritative DNS service provider. An authoritative DNS service provider will have a set of Name Servers assigned to the domain that will be responsible for answering any incoming queries for that specific domain.

If a user types in the following FQDN(Fully Qualified Domain Name) www.domainexample.com, the name servers will provide that user with the IP address of the webserver where www.domainexample.com is hosted, and the page will resolve from the user's web browser. 

A simple version of this service is often offered by your registrar, but you can also look for organizations that are only dedicated to professional-grade authoritative DNS services, such as ourselves. 

2. Name Server Delegation

After you obtain the list of Name Servers from your authoritative DNS service, you will add them to your registrar. Your registrar is the same organization of where you have purchased your domain from. 

Each registrar is unique, so we advise that you contact your registrar for specific support in this step if necessary. 

3. Import your records

Finally, you will add the records pertaining to the domain within your DNS service provider interface. For the most part, if you are using a web hosting service provider, you will be given an IP address. If that is the case, then you will have what we call an A record,  which points your domain to the server that hosts the content file for your domain. The domain may also contain CNAME, ANAME, TXT, MX, PTR, AAAA records, which can point you to your website, point mail to your mail server, or add needed verification. 

When you add your domain zone file into your DNS service provider, you are telling the delegated name servers the values you would like to have propagated for that domain. These are then stored at the resolver based on the TTL (time to live) that you specified.