DNS is the layer that connects your domain to everything that depends on it. When it’s right, nobody notices. When it’s wrong, several things break at once and the cause is rarely obvious.
Your website, your email, your single sign-on, your CRM, your payment provider’s verification records — all of them are reached through DNS. It’s a small amount of configuration holding up a large amount of business, which is why we treat it as a managed service rather than a control panel we hand you the keys to.
What we manage
- All standard record types — A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT, SRV and CAA
- Email authentication — SPF, DKIM and DMARC, configured correctly and kept consistent as your mail setup changes
- DNSSEC, where your domain’s extension supports it, to protect against spoofing and cache poisoning
- Redundant nameservers across separate locations, so your DNS stays answerable if one goes offline
- Failover and routing where your setup needs it
- Monitoring, so that in most cases we know before you do
Why managed, rather than self-service
Most DNS incidents aren’t attacks. They’re edits.
The two we see most often are worth naming, because both are easy to cause and hard to diagnose:
Repointing a domain and taking email with it. A new website goes live, someone updates the records to point at the new host, and the MX records disappear in the same edit. The website looks perfect. Email stops company-wide, and because the change was made for an unrelated reason, nobody connects the two for hours.
Replacing an SPF record instead of appending to it. A new tool needs permission to send mail as your domain, so its instructions are followed literally and a fresh SPF record replaces the existing one. Nothing breaks immediately. Weeks later, invoices start landing in customers’ spam folders and nobody knows why.
Neither is a failure of care. They’re the result of a change being made by someone who could see the record but not everything that depended on it. When we hold your DNS, that’s the part we supply.
How changes are made
Change requests come to us by email or phone, from the people you’ve told us are authorised to make them. Before we make a change we check what else relies on the record in question. We then make the change, confirm it’s taken effect, and tell you.
Urgent changes are treated as urgent — if a site migration is happening on a Saturday morning, that’s when it gets done.
Email deliverability
DNS is where email deliverability is won or lost. SPF, DKIM and DMARC determine whether the mail you send is trusted, and misconfiguration is common — particularly in businesses that have added marketing platforms, invoicing tools or helpdesk software over time, each with its own sending requirements.
We keep these records coherent as tools are added and removed, so your mail keeps arriving and your domain is harder to spoof. There’s more detail on our email deliverability page.
Working alongside your domains
DNS problems are often domain problems, and website problems are often DNS problems. When your registrar, your DNS and your hosting sit with three different suppliers, each can reasonably point at the other two — and you’re the one left coordinating it.
Most of our clients have us hold their domains and DNS together for exactly that reason. There’s then no question of where the responsibility sits.
If you’d like the underlying concepts explained without jargon, see how DNS actually works.
Get in touch
Call 01202 835235 or email contact@domainwarden.co.uk and we’ll talk through your current setup.