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(D)riving me (N)ut(S) - DNS

June 13, 2026
learningwebsites

I may be a software engineer, but before the website you’re reading this on (woah, self-referentialism), I had never created a website of my own from scratch. In reality, I had never really had anything on the internet that I could point to and call my own. A month or two ago I got this urge to be able to own my little corner of the internet, so I started looking into how to set up a website. Ostensibly, it was very simple, just buy a domain from one of the providers, yada yada yada, and then you have a website! The complexity became clear when I realized I had no idea what a CNAME record was, what nameservers were, or even what DNS stood for.

Before diving into my own experience learning about this, I’m going to have a glossary of terms that are common in the DNS world. Even if not necessary when reading this, it may be a helpful guide for both you and me in the future.

There are other types records, but I think these will do for now.

The reason why all these records and concepts were difficult for me to wrap my head around was because I have been interacting with this my entire life but have not once really cared enough to dive deeper into how it worked. It turns out that when you ignore something that is right in front of you for so long, it becomes hard to get it into focus once more.

As a side note, when trying to set up my website I made the mistake of going too fast and not really learning the process as I went. I used AI to guide me through the steps, which is a decision I stand by as it certainly got me off the ground quick, but it was very easy to not learn anything if I did not want to. When I realized I was just following instructions (and was basically an intern for my AI overlord), I thought better of my approach and took a minute to try to understand what any of these records meant. This blog post is also just here for me to learn a little bit better.

The first obvious step was to buy a domain… but buy it from where? There are multiple ‘brokers’ (called registrars) that are authorized to sell domains. Buying a domain from a particular registrar does not mean you have to stick with them through the development process, as you can always choose to change your NS Record. Some registrars have deals with different master registries (owners of .com, .org, etc.), so not all possible domains may be everywhere, but big registrars will host the popular extensions.

I bought my domain from Squarespace because it was a company name I knew, but honestly given I knew I wanted to host the site on AWS it may have been easier to buy it off of Route53 (AWS’s own registrar). In any case, thanks to the handy ability to edit NS records, it’s really no sweat off my back. Well, actually it was a little sweat off my back to be honest, because for whatever reason Route53 NS record values always end with a . (e.g. ns-123.awsdns-45.net.). Turns out, you are not supposed to include that dot when adding it as a custom NS record in Squarespace… But at least now it truly won’t be any sweat off your back.

Honestly, I am not entirely sure what all I wanted to talk about in this post other than the high level details of what each of the records are and of the DNS as a whole. I hope you have enjoyed your time as much as I have enjoyed learning about this in order to write a bit about it :)

SMART goal: For future blog posts, write down the goals of the post at the very start. This way both me and the viewers can know what to expect out of it.

PS: DNS stands for Domain Name System.