I have signed up for several domains through Google Apps. And so far I have always used eNom. I don’t remember what made me pick eNom over Godaddy the very first time, but subsequently I always used eNom because I didn’t wanted to learn yet another Advanced DNS settings user interface.
But when I registered a new domain today I thought I would give GoDaddy a try just for the heck of it. That decision turned out to be a wrong one. Here is why.
Many hosting solutions these days provide unlimited domain hosting with the appropriate plan. The unlimited domain hosting will allow adding as many domains as one wants using the same account. Of course, the overall physical limits such as bandwidth, harddisk etc remain the same but these days even those are practically unlimited. So, the one resource that would become a bottleneck eventually, if you happen to turn many of those addon domains to be successful, is the CPU.
Anyway, my primary domain is hosted on a specific server of the hosting provider. Over time, this server domain will remain the same but the IP address can change. Not often, but it did happen once in the last 2yrs. Prior to this happened, I always used to specify the IP address and create the A record in the DNS settings. But one fine day, my website stopped working and it was because of the change in the IP address. From then on, I removed all the A records and created a wild CNAME record. This would allow my top level domain name to point to subdomain name of the server that hosts my website. Something like
@ xyz.hostingprovider’sdomain.com CNAME
From then on, I never had any problems. One drawback with this approach is that resolving my domain name to the physical address requires additional lookup.
Anyway, it turns out that GoDaddy doesn’t support wildcard CNAMEs. So, I had to leave a single A record with the server’s ip address.
Next time I have to pick a domain registrar with Google Apps, you know whom I would go with.
Just wanted to drop a note…A CNAME record should not carry with it any additional performance penalty so long as the TTL is set to a decent level.
Comment by Jon — April 26, 2009 @ 9:49 pm |