A Very Reliable Free DNS Manager/Provider

Yesterday was a problem day for me. While rushing for a Toastmasters meeting early in the morning and just when I was almost at the meeting venue I hit the car in front of me. And what looked like a small issue of me fixing his bumper became a 3 days issue of having to fix it on Monday. It was a company car and they wouldn't let me fix it without involving their official vehicle maintenance vendor.

Then my company website suddenly went down. It had to do with the company providing my domain services and they weren't very helpful. I had to figure out a way to solve the issue myself. And it falls under the category of problems I couldn't find a how-to article online for. So I'm writing the how-to I couldn't find. Just as Toni Morrison said, "If there's a book you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."

If you know you'll never have to fix an issue similar to this, you can stop reading from here. I will try to come up with a more generally relevant post for tomorrow.

I had my company website, www.urbizedge.com, hosted on SiteGround from September 2013 to September 2014. Then when Microsoft gave me free $250 per month to use their superior cloud and hosting services I decided to cancel my hosting with SiteGround and use Microsoft Azure. But Microsoft doesn't provide domain management, you'll have to buy domain and manage it from another provider and then make it link to the Azure services.

I had to continue letting SiteGround manage my domain and even paid for the domain to be renewed for one more year after the hosting package had expired. Everything worked fine. I had set up the Azure hosting and linked to it from SiteGround domain management tool.

The sun was up and the sky was blue until yesterday. I got an email from blessed Google that my company website was no longer accessible. I checked to confirm and Google was right. There was an error that the domain name resolution failed; meaning that SiteGround's DNS wasn't providing access to my domain anymore. I contacted them and was told to fix it myself. In the end, I had to use a third party DNS manager to rectify the issue.

I searched for a free and reliable DNS manager, and came across many but one stood out: Hurricane Electric Free DNS Management 

It had no string attached and worked perfectly. In few minutes I was able to create A and CNAME records pointing to my Azure hosting. Now my company website is back.

The process was very straightforward. I have used paid services to do the same from GoDaddy and SiteGround, they are the easiest to use among them all. And completely free. The steps were uncomplicated. I wish Hostgator will take a clue from them.

All I did was to:

1. Sign up to use their services
2. Enter the domain name I want to create DNS record for
3. Create the A record and CNAMEs
4. Use their DNS servers as my new provider

No adverts or annoying pop-ups. Just a simple interface to help me get done fast. If you someday run into similar problem I recommend you use them.