Web Design Business with Josh Hall
The Web Design Business Podcast with host Josh Hall is here to help you build a web design business that allows you to have freedom and a lifestyle you love. As a web designer and web agency owner of over a decade, Josh knows the challenges, struggles and often painful lessons of building a web design business without any guidance, proven strategies or a mentor to help you along the way, which is why this show exists. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of coaching, mentorship and guidance to help you build your dream web design business. All while having a good time doing it. Through interviews with seasoned web design business professionals and online entrepreneurs, solo coaching episodes with Josh and even case studies with his students, you’ll learn practical tips and strategies for web business building along with real-world advice and trends that are happening right now in the wild and wonderful world of web design. Subscribe if you’re ready to start or level up your web design business and for all show notes, links, full transcriptions for each episode, head to https://joshhall.co/podcast
Web Design Business with Josh Hall
393 - New DNS Course (Free Lesson + DNS Checklist)
I just launched a new DNS Course for Web Designers, specifically to help you get a 101, foundational understanding of all things domains, DNS records, email, security, performance, etc.
It replaced what was formerly my cPanel course. It’s a short, snappy, “what you need to know” DNS course without getting too technical or overwhelming. In this podcast episode, I’m giving you a little teaser!
Included in the episode:
- A few personal DNS horror stories (to illustrate how important it is to know this stuff as a web designer)
- The most popular lesson so far on ‘Domain Types’
- And I’m even including the DNS Checklist from the course FOR FREE! Think of it as your DNS SOP for you and your team.
Again, be sure to download the DNS Checklist I’ve made available to you for free. It also includes a special offer if you’d like to dive into the full course!
Show notes at joshhall.co/393
Loving the Web Design Business podcast? You'll really love the Web Design Business Newsletter!
It's completely free! Sign up today to get:
✅ Josh’s Web Design Biz Revenue Calculator (instant access)
✅ The top 5 newsletters (over the next 5 days)
✅ A special offer for Web Designer Pro™
Sign up here 👉 joshhall.co/newsletter
Hello, my web designer friend, it's great to have you here Now. As a web designer, whether you like it or not, you are dealing with DNS and if you've been in this game for any amount of time, you know that there can be absolute nightmare horror stories that happen when you do things like take a site down or break your client's email, and a lot of these things can be avoided if you just know the very basics of things like domain types, name servers, dns records, imap versus POP setup, mx records, onsite security, ssl, et cetera. So I'm very excited to announce that I just released a new version of what was formerly my cPanel course and it is now my new DNS course for web designers, and in this podcast episode I'm going to give you a couple of freebies. I'm going to give you a teaser of a couple of lessons in the course. I've got actually three things for you. Number one here it's all wrapped up in this episode. Number one, I'm going to share the lesson on a few of my personal DNS horror stories to just illustrate how important it is to know, again, just the basics of DNS. You don't need to be an expert, but for you and your team, this is going to be absolutely key to avoiding the nightmare situations that you'll hear here shortly. And then I'm also going to share what is my most popular lesson of the course so far, because all of my community members in Web Designer Pro got early access to the course. So far, because all of my community members in Web Designer Pro got early access to the course, and so far, the domains lesson is one of the most popular lessons in there. It covers the different types of domain extensions and types, which is really important to understand, especially for you and your clients. So I'm going to let you in on that lesson. And then I'm also going to share, completely for free, the DNS checklist. This is the checklist that is basically an overview of the highlights of the main aspects of the course. I'm going to make that available completely for free for you. You don't even need to give me your email. All you need to do is go to joshhallco slash 393. That will be the show notes for this episode, and I made a Google Doc version of the checklist that you can just check out and download in any format that you please. So, completely free, joshhallco slash 393 is where to pick that up For now. Enjoy a little bit of a teaser to the new DNS course for web designers and, as it goes without saying, if you'd like, the full course link will be below to jump in and get access, with a special offer to check out my brand new DNS course to help save you so much stress like what I experienced and that you'll hear now.
Josh:Now, before we dive into the nitty gritty of DNS and take a look at all this stuff, I wanted to start off by sharing some DNS stories, more specifically, some horror stories stories, aka nightmares that I experienced in my journey as a web designer, to illustrate the importance of knowing at least the basics of DNS. So I'm going to share three stories that's all I felt like digging into the past for that are going to help illustrate some of the most important things here to help you avoid these types of scenarios. So let's dig in to Josh's DNS horror stories. All right, we're going to start off with. I'm telling you I had some PTSD going back into some of these stories, but we'll start off with number one, which is when I broke a client's email.
Josh:Now, what happened in this scenario? We went live with a new website that I created for Capital City Staffing Great client was in my networking group and everything. What I did not realize was, when we moved him over to his new hosting, that I had neglected what will come into play here in the course the MX record which controls email. And when I changed the name servers which we'll cover as well to point his website over to the new hosting I had set up for him, I did not set up his email correctly and all of his email broke and he lost virtually all of his email. Now we'll cover this as well. He had two there's two different types of email setups. He had pop email, which meant, in short, that his email was downloaded directly on his in-office computers and machines. So when he went into the office on a Saturday morning we launched on a Friday night, I get a call first thing Saturday morning frantic, saying Josh, our email's down, what happened? And I'm freaking out trying to figure out what the heck went wrong. And only then did I realize when we moved the site over to the new hosting, I did not transfer for the email settings correctly and essentially he went into his office Saturday morning, logged on the computer and had no email at all.
Josh:Now what we did, moving forward to rectify. This was, thank goodness, at that time I had met Amr, my email colleague and guru who was in Web Designer Pro, and I contacted him and he was able to work with them to get some of the backups of those emails and contact lists. But we didn't get all of it and my client lost some contacts, lost a lot of email and because he did not have native backups of the email, essentially when we changed the site over to the new hosting it broke everything. So again, it wasn't even a full solution. It was a very, very costly situation for my client. It was a nightmare for me spent the entire weekend talking to the new hosts and the old hosts and trying to figure it out and then they were like well, their email was downloaded on the machines via pop, so there's nothing we can do. And then Joe didn't know what to do. My client thankfully, amber stepped in and got on a call with him and helped get some of the stuff back with some like I think, urgent type of backup stuff that was in place, but they did not recover all of it and it was a nightmare situation. That was number one me breaking my client's email. Horror story number two, and I don't even know which one's worse. This may take the cake, but the first one was bad as well.
Josh:We went live again on a Friday night as most websites do often on a Friday night for my client location. They were formerly called Keiko Realty and they had a site for their agents and it was a brand new thing. They had hyped it up. They were all excited about getting their real estate agents onto their own platform, onto the site. We went live and what I did was I went into their hosting and I deleted the old databases to the websites, because generally, after I go live with a new WordPress website, we go into what was a staging site or a test site and we delete the databases. Well, I didn't know that I deleted the wrong database. I deleted the live site database We'll get into this in the course for those of you who are WordPress designers but in short, the database houses all the content and all the pages and the post types and everything. So the site just looked wacky. And then, uh, I got a frantic call from the client saying there's, it says there's an error with the database. I go in there thinking I had cleared out our old test sites and I had deleted the actual live site that had just went live, that they were pushing traffic to and marketing and spending money marketing to it.
Josh:Now here's the bigger problem. I didn't take a backup. Let me say that again because you're like Josh, isn't it like a one-on-one that you would think you would think it would be a one-on-one thing, but I was early in my journey and then I did not realize that as soon as you get your WordPress website design, you take a backup. You take a backup of all the site files, the database, everything in there which you could do with a bunch of different tools via your hosting or ManageWP, umbrellawp, et cetera. So when I deleted the database, I had no backup. No backup to just restore. This was before I used ManageWP, by the way.
Josh:And then the first thing I did was talk to the host and they said they didn't have a backup. We were experimenting with a hosting company that was recommended to me. That was not a notable company. Most hosting companies, especially now, have some sort of backup, especially within like a 24-hour period. They did not. They were not able to restore that database. So the client's freaking out, they've got traffic going there.
Josh:So guess what? I had to spend my entire weekend doing Rebuilding the site. It was, I want to say, 15 pages at least and, yes, I had the design and code saved. That I had done and I had all their assets. But I had to recreate an entirely new WordPress. Remember the styling, remember how the page layouts went. I had to redo everything and I spent an entire weekend. I remember being so stressed out, so burned out, because you have to think too. This was after a probably a good six week period of designing that site. It was a big project. It was one of two projects for them Finally got it launched. So I'm thinking like it's vacation time. I'm going to chill out this weekend and spend a lot of work.
Josh:The opposite happened and it was terrible. Thankfully, my client somewhat understood, although I did take the ownership of it. But I said I thought for sure we'd get a backup from the host. That was not the case. They paid me a little bit of extra money for the extra work, but I essentially worked for pennies hustling to get that site back on and this hairline was down here until both of those horror stories kept on moving it up. This is a DNS problem. This receding hairline right here, it's DNS. This would have been right here had just those two horror stories not happened. So back up your WordPress site immediately before launch of your WordPress user.
Josh:Then, finally, my third and final horror story so I can get out of this nightmare and get out of the past was my own website and transitstudioscom was hacked. And guess when it got hacked? When I was on my honeymoon. So got married to my beautiful wife, emily. We're on our honeymoon. We did really good at not being online at all on the honeymoon, so didn't even log on or anything. It waited until we got home and my first day back to work I opened my email and I see an email from a colleague of mine who went to send me a referral and he said hey, josh, just want to let you know your site is down. It's just showing a blank white screen. And I was like, oh God, what have? I'm all excited to get back into work and everything site was not just down or broken, it was hacked and we'll get into a little bit of security and hack prevention and measures in this.
Josh:But what I did not realize was often when sites get hacked, they will get blacklisted from Google. So not only was I hacked to figure out how to restore the files, either with a backup or with another solution, but I had to submit to Google all my stuff and get it un-blacklisted de-blacklisted, whatever the correct terminology is. This is when I found out about the company Securi and I ended up hiring Securi. It was the best thing I did. They got my site back up and running, protected stuff. I changed all the passwords, we did some other security precautions that we'll cover in the course, and then they actually reached out on my behalf to Google and got the site reinstated and not blacklisted the other thing that can happen.
Josh:Thankfully, I had my email separated, but when your email is on the same server, as we'll talk about, as your website, if your website gets hacked, your email can get hacked too. Thankfully, I avoided one level deeper of a nightmare by not having my email on the same server, but nonetheless trying to enjoy my honeymoon. What does a web designer have to do to enjoy a vacation? Right, come back home. My website is hacked. Had I known in all three of these horror stories, had I known number one about name servers and MX records, I wouldn't have broke my client's email. Number two had I known that the database of a WordPress website is where all the pages and content and posts are. I wouldn't have broke a site that just went live and number three had I known better basic security members or measures and not had bad hosting on Bluehost. Sorry, bluehost, but you get hacked all the time. I wouldn't have had a hack during my honeymoon and I could have enjoyed the post honeymoon phase even more. So I hope you enjoyed this. Again. Three real world stories, horror stories that I experienced, and all I had to know was just some of the basics that we're going to get into here in this course to help you avoid those and a lot more.
Josh:So, without further ado, let's get into it Now. Here is the lesson on domain types, which is the first lesson in the entire domains module of the course. I hope you enjoy it and again, check below for all the details to go to the show notes page to get the free DNS checklist that I've made available for you and a special offer to jump into the course. And just a reminder when you get access to this course, you'll also get access to my entire collection of courses in Web Designer Pro, so you can jump into this one, have some fun and then jump into some other courses to see what's a good fit for you to help you grow your web design business ASAP as possible.
Josh:So we're going to kick off with domains, which are really the most important things when it comes to DNS, and this is going to be the media section of the course, because a lot goes into the different aspects of domains. What this is going to be is a very one-on-one overview. We're going to cover a few things. We're going to get into what a domain is, where to purchase those, what types of domains are common, which is going to be really important, so do not skip this. And then I'm also going to give you a bit of a bonus, which is kind of just some best practice principles for your domain setup.
Josh:So what is a domain? It is just like a DNS. A domain name system, like we just talked about, is a humanized version of the internet. A domain name is the human friendly address of a website. So when you type in my current websites, joshhallco or webdesignaprocom, what is actually behind that is something like this like you would see in the matrix, it's a bunch of numbers and those numbers are called the IP address, which, if you're feeling wild and want to know what that means. It is the Internet Protocol address, so it looks like this. The human way to think about this is it's like a mailing address for a house in the real world, but it's a website. So this would be like the address of a house basically. But as a human, thank goodness we don't need to type this in, we can just type in this.
Josh:But I remember one time I was getting a ton of site traffic in Russia and what we did is I actually just blocked IP addresses in that region. So if you were to have literally like one IP address that is like a bot or something that's trying to hack your website, you can actually go in and block an IP address or you can block a certain region. I have a local colleague who manages a lot of websites and they were getting a lot of traffic from outside of China and they're just a local business in Columbus Ohio, so there was no reason for them to get a ton of traffic. So they found out they were trying to get hacked, so they just blocked an entire region and you can do that with the IP address. So that's kind of what's going on behind a domain name. Again, it looks a lot like this Thank goodness we don't have to deal with that Now. Where to purchase? You can purchase domain names with whatever hosting company you choose or we'll get into this in best practices but you can also use a separate domain registrar and then point your domain to your preferred hosting and I'll explain why that's best practice at the end here. So gonna keep you on edge on that. Explain why that's best practice at the end here. So going to keep you on edge on that.
Josh:But very common domain name registrars or GoDaddy or Namecheap. I still use GoDaddy for purchasing a lot of different domain names, especially because I do have SiteGround, and you'll notice here in my domains and SiteGround I have some that are purchased here, but then I have some that are just hosted here but actually purchased at GoDaddy. Now if you have a host that you really trust and you've been with for years, there's absolutely nothing wrong with purchasing domains in your preferred hosting. But if, for any reason, you're just not sure you're going to stick with a host, it's actually best just to purchase on GoDaddy or Namecheap or a different one. There's a ton, by the way, a ton of great domain registrars. You can Google it or you can. Whatever web design group you're a part of Hopefully it's Web Designer Pro you can figure out what's common. But you can purchase these and then we'll get into how to actually point these to a preferred hosting company. This is also really common practice, especially if you're working with clients who like to buy a lot of domain names.
Josh:I was working with a client one time who had like it was over a hundred domain names that he bought, and sometimes you know, like you'll see, I bought lawn weeniecom. I don't know if I'm going to use it, but it was available. I have an interest in being a lawn weenie and have a nice green grass, so I got it just in case. I did that, and go daddy just so I could manage it. And let's say, one day I don't even want to use a WordPress website, I use a different builder or something, or maybe it's a community that's not on WordPress. Then I have the ability in GoDaddy to say, hey, point this over here. But again, I do have domains purchased through SiteGround as well, and we'll get into the different types of domains.
Josh:Next, when it comes to domains, there's about seven primary types of domains and we'll cover each one of these here real quick. When you set up your hosting account, you will start off with what's called a primary domain, like WebDesignerProcom, or actually I set up my SiteGround hosting with JoshHallco, so that's my primary domain. Okay, web designer procom is another domain that I had purchased on GoDaddy, but I have pointed and hosted over at SiteGround. The next few lessons will share more on detail on how I did this, but the reason I mentioned this is Josh Hallco is technically the primary domain name in SiteGround, but you'll see web designer procom is hosted here but it's actually what's known as an external domain. So this is just kind of a caveat because technically you could have a domain that's primary on your hosting but it's maybe purchased. The actual domain name is purchased elsewhere. So this is actually a really good case study and example of how to have this set up. Because joshhallco was purchased at SiteGround, the domain name was purchased and registered at SiteGround was purchased at SiteGround. The domain name was purchased and registered at SiteGround. Webdesignerprocom was purchased and registered at GoDaddy, but I have it hosted under SiteGround, which is why it's called an external domain. If I were to transfer WebdesignerProcom the domain and register at SiteGround, this would drop. This would not say external domain, it would be an internal domain. So big note there when it comes to primary and external domains, but they're very similar. I'm keeping this under 0.1 and 1A.
Josh:Now you can have different domains on your hosting account and those are called add-on domains. So what you see here I have a couple add-on domains, one which is just kind of testing and then one which is a domain I've owned for years, which are found here under my websites, but they are add-on. But because they are an add-on domain, they are different URLs but they're on my same hosting and my same server, unless I would separate these. But just know that when you have an add-on domain, basically you don't need to sign up for a new hosting account for every domain. Thank goodness you can have one hosting account, depending on your setup, and have different add-on domains that are different URLs. But if I wanted to do something under the same URLs that you see here, those are called subdomains. So for and actually you see this with my agency site. It's called in transit studios, that's in transit studioscom. But I have a version of my agency that was the me version of it before I sold that and that's it, josh dot in transit studioscom. So that is not hosted with me. That's actually actually hosted with my CEO, eric, and that is what's called a subdomain, so it resides under that. You'll see this often with staging sites, so that's kind of.
Josh:The next option is you can create a subdomain which, by the way, a staging site is basically a subdomain. It just means that this is something that's going to be only live for a little while, or it could be a testing site that's not live. So the reason I separated this is a subdomain may be live, like I have here, and a lot of times these will be live sites that folks will drive traffic to, for example, my friend Jay Klaus, who runs Creator Science. He has a very popular podcast and when we click over to the podcast, look at the URL, it changes to podcastcreatorsciencecom. So it's a whole different website but it is a subdomain here.
Josh:But the reason this is different is that this is a live, searchable, indexed domain name. So I wouldn't consider this a staging site because it's live. It is a subdomain which can be completely live and searchable. That's different than a staging site, which would be something like dev or testing somewhere where you may want to have a site live on a browser but it's not indexed by Google and other search engines. For example, under my joshhallco domain I actually have a tutorial site that only I see. You could I mean technically you can go to this URL and access it, but I don't have this indexed because I wanted a live site to play around with. But, as you can tell, this should not be seen by the public. But if somebody goes on there, it's fine, no problem. But that's the difference.
Josh:But you can create staging sites, either live on a browser or hidden, because sometimes you may want to create a staging site that a client could access and then, when you're ready to go live, then you move it to their real domain. This is a solid way to do it. But then there are also temporary domains and these are generally host generated but they do have different levels of access and limits and constraints on who can view them. For example, in my SiteGround hosting account we look at the websites that I have here this one here I was actually playing around with SiteGround's website builder and you can tell this is not a live domain name that somebody's going to type in. This is actually a temporary domain. It's kind of a mix of a staging domain, but temporary, because, again, staging may be something that you want to reference, either live or hidden. Temporary is going to be purely domain hosted and you can spin these up pretty quickly usually. So in the case of SiteGround, if I wanted to add a new domain, I can add a domain that is registered here in SiteGround, or I can add a domain that is registered elsewhere, or I could use a temporary domain and even if I just wanted to start testing out a new design or something, this is where I would do that and it's going to give me a wacky string of numbers that generally only I am going to see, and the last couple here.
Josh:A parked domain means that you have a domain name registered but it's an inactive website and you can actually park domains under your websites here. So if I go into Web Designer Pro dot com under my site tools that we looked at in the DNS overview, under domains, here you can see I have an option to look at subdomains, which I have some subdomains. I have an option to look at subdomains which I have some subdomains. I'm actually currently building a model site for you and other students to be able to reference to under webdesignaprocom, and memberwebdesignaprocom is where this course is, which we'll get into next. There's also options for redirecting domains entirely, and then parked domains. I could add a parked domain that I own, but that doesn't mean it's going to be a live URL. It just means that I can actually like have a registered domain that is parked under this domain. This is a little more intricate and not super often you're going to do a park domain, but just know. That's kind of the difference in the way I understand it. It's an active domain but it is in an active website.
Josh:And then, finally, a custom domain, which means inside of Web Designer Pro. Here, the back, the behind the scenes of what runs Web Designer Pro, is Circle, which is a self-hosted platform, and I connect that to the subdomain memberwebdesignerprocom. So where you're viewing this course is memberwebdesignerprocom. This is a custom domain and you'll see this with Webflow and Squarespace and a lot of other self-hosted platforms where you could go in and it'll say, right here, in the case of Circle, where do you want your domain pointed to? Because technically, the domain you're looking at inside of Web Designer Pro is this. The domain is actually webdesignerprocircleso, but this redirects to the custom domain we set up, which is memberwebdesignerpro, which is right here.
Josh:I set up a subdomain, memberwebdesignerprocom, and then, inside of Circle this is where I point this to that. How do you do that? Well, that's in the DNS zone editor, which we're gonna cover shortly. So those are the different types of domains, really really important Primary, and you may have external domains that are connected or not connected to your primary domain. Add-on domains, which are different URLs.
Josh:Subdomains like this, which are often gonna be live, staging domains, which are basically fancy subdomains that are just going to be for testing or development purposes. Temporary domains, once they're host generated, that clients are not going to view. Park domains which are active but not active. Websites. And then custom domains.
Josh:And lastly, really quick when it comes to best practices, to put this all together, common best practices, especially for clients, is to purchase a domain name from a registrar, like Namecheap or GoDaddy, and then host it elsewhere, like SiteGround, wp Engine etc. And what you'll do. We'll get into this next with the records, but you can buy a domain name and then you can point it, like you saw here in my setup, to your preferred hosting. Again, if you know, you're going to stick with a hosting company for a long time. There's no shame in the game of just hosting there and purchasing your domains there.
Josh:But if, for any reason, you need to leave a host, or they get bought out or they get purchased, or things turn into a nightmare, it's double the hassle, because not only do you want to move your sites to another host, but then you also have to move the domain names and the authority which we're going to cover next, and it's just a huge nightmare if you should need to leave a host. So that is why, in most cases, best practices are to buy a domain name and have it registered in a certain place and then point it to a different host. This also comes into play with email, which we're going to cover soon as well. So things like a record C names on how to point these. What the heck does that mean? Don't worry, we're going to cover that shortly.
