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Domain registrars vary in how they offer advanced DNS management, and this is a guide to the principles of setting up the DNS on your domain name. If in doubt, you should contact your registrar.

A Records

The first DNS record we need is an A record. This tells computers the IP address associated with a particular domain name.

For example, you may want to point www.domain.com to 80.240.88.45

In this case you would add an A record as follows:

Hostname: the host or subdomain of your top level domain that you wish to point

IP: The IP (Internet Protocol) address of the server, provided to you by you hosting provider (in your welcome email if that's Ecohost).

TTL: (Time To Live) The time in seconds beyond which a dns server will be forced to expire its cache and look up the current value of the record.  In our case 14400 secs / 60 = 240 mins = 4 hours.

Standard A record settings suggested for domains hosted on Ecohost servers.

*    80.240.88.45 
@  80.240.88.45

The * is a wild card which will allow point all subdomains to the IP address specified, such as www.doamin.com, mail.domain.com, subdomain.domain.com.

Notes:

1. If you want to point email and we hosting to different servers, you will need another A record to point (for example) mail.domain.com to the desired IP address.
2. for sub domains to work on your Ecohost hosting, you'll need to set up additional subdomains or a means of dealing with the incoming subdomain request.)

The @ symbol in this context represents the plain domain. For example 'mydomain.com'. With some registrars, this is just left blank, rather than adding an @ symbol.

MX Records.

To use email for your domain you need to set at least one MX record.

After setting a wildcard above, we usually set at least one MX record as follows:

Value: mail.domain.com
MX Priority: 10 

This will point all email to mail.domain.com, which in turn points to the IP address specified in the wildcard A record above.