Hi - although I’ve had web sites hosted by hosting companies for many years, for complicated reasons, I will now have to step up and do it myself. That will probably mean using a VPS but without the provision of any kind of control panel (like CPanel or Plesk). Because of this, I have been looking around for something usable, reliable and (let’s face it) cheap ! From what I have seen and read so far, webmin/virtualmin seems to be a prime candidate.
When I found out that there were Virtualmin AMIs for Amazon EC2, I thought that this would be the ideal way to try things out and I was able to have a brief go at it. (EC2 may be the ultimate solution, but it’s not certain.)
But it was only when I got to the virtualmin post-installation wizard that I began to realise that I am rather confused about name-servers. I have dug in to some of the resources here, but it hasn’t really clarified things for me, hence this post. Apologies if the answer is out there and I have missed it or if I have read it and not understood it (worse !)
In the past, for each domain I have got hosted (e.g. mywebsite1.com, etc), I have simply ascertained the nameservers of my hosting company (ns1.hostingcompany.com, etc) and then put this in the appropriate place on the domain registrar’s control panel, then set up the domain on the host and then waited for propagation. Now that I am the host, I’m not quite sure how this goes - I guess I need ns1.myvps.com or something like that, right ?
So … I registered an anonymous sounding domain name with Namecheap, which I will refer to here as myvpsdomain.com. I figured that in the future, when I create a virtual server for a new domain (say, mywebsite2.com), I change follow the same process i.e. change its nameserver entry for on its registration at the domain registrar to point to “ns1.myvpsdomain.com” in the same way as before, right ?
But what about the DNS for myvps.com ? Namecheap’s help (http://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/768/10/how-do-i-register-private-nameservers-for-my-domain) suggests using their “Register private nameservers” process to point to the IP address of my VPS. But is that it ?
Questions.
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(I don’t have access to that AMI at the moment, so I can’t remember the exact wording, but I’m sure that those in the know recognise this step). The post-installation wizard has a question which asks for a resolvable name for the nameservers - what goes in there ?
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Aren’t there some other DNS records needed (Type A ???) for the nameservers: I haven’t seen anything on that.
Sorry if this is basic, but in the jump to the “meta” level of effectively being the host itself, some of my circuits got fried. In spite of that, I hope my questions make sense.
Any input is much appreciated.
R.