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When editing DNS records, there are some important issues to keep in mind. Improperly editing DNS records, or making changes that are not needed, can disable website and email service for up to a day or more while nameservers world-wide refresh the changes. It is important to double-check any DNS changes before they are submitted, and always be sure of the changes that you are making.

A common mistake is forgetting to add the period at the end of absolute DNS records. For example, if your offsite mailserver is called mail.example.com, be sure to enter this as: mail.example.com. with the period at the end. Not including the period signals to the nameservers to append your domain; so if you entered mail.example.com as your MX record, the nameserver would interpret this as mail.example.com.yoursitedomain.com., which would be incorrect. Always double-check that you have included periods where they are needed.

You may use the @ symbol to refer to your main domain name; for example, if you are adding a subdomain called www2 that will point back to your main site, you can use the @ character to refer to your main site. Any record that is listed as @ simply means ‘point this back to my VDS’.

When adding an MX record, you must enter a hostname, not an IP address into the record. If your MX record is set to an IP address (ie, a numerical address), many (primarily older) mailservers will not deliver mail to it. You should create an A (address) record first that points to your IP address, then specify that the MX record point to your newly created A record.

It is not possible to change your “main A record”, or where your domain name with no prefix points to. If you wish to host your website on an offsite server and use your VDS Hosting account for email access, you must change the nameservers on file for your domain name, then have your new host change the MX record to point back to your hosting account with OpenSourceHost.

Contact OpenSourceHost Customer Support if you have any questions or problems when adding and managing DNS records.

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