When purchasing a domain (I have always trusted www.fasthosts.co.uk) and as I have realised their domain panel for account holders is very user friendly (compared to one.com and 1&1).
Imagine that your site is called www.nadiahasanie.com you have nameserver which are placed somewhere. As I specified above, I have chosen to use www.fasthosts.co.uk and annually I pay for renewal of that ownership and domain registration/nameserver “home”. When hosting a site you need to choose a server and I will discus that later (CLICK THIS LINK WHEN IVE DONE THIS POST). That server will give you an IP address, which is a series of numbers that have dots in the middle of them (similar to your home router login 198.168.0.1 etc – located when you want to manage your home router. This server address needs to store the information for your site and the domain DNS need to point towards that.
Within the control panel with whomever you registered your domain – you need to add DNS records pointing towards your server.
The DNS changes are as follows:
(bold are the essential)
A Records
• Mail.domain.com
• Mailserver.domain.com
• Smtp.domain.com
• Webmail.domain.com
• ________.domain.com (blank entry essential)
• www.domain.com
• ftp.domain.com
• ssh.domain.com
• server.domain.com (for main server domain registry on the root server)
MX Records
• mail.domain.com
• mailserver.domain.com
SPF Records
• required in “text” (use spfwizard.com to generate online)
Text Record
• required in “text” (use spfwizard.com to generate online same as above)
Note. SPF records give the rules for mail recieving and spam rules. These can be easily created using the spf wizard online. These mail DNS records are for IMAP or POP mailboxes and not for exchange mailboxes which need different DNS records.