Managing the technical structure of dentists’ websites, hosting services, domain names and email is something that we specialise in here at Dental Media. It relieves all of the burden from the dentists themselves and allows them to get on with their business of dentistry.<\/p>\n
However, it\u2019s not all clients who wish to take a hands-off approach like that and many dentists prefer to have at least a working knowledge of how all of those technical elements are integrated and work together. So without going into lots of technical detail, here is a quick overview of how all of that works.<\/p>\n
This is essentially your dental practice website<\/a> address and in the UK typically takes the form of xyzdental.co.uk. The domain name is registered at a domain registrar of which there are number to choose from in the UK. You can also choose from lots of different domain versions e.g. .com .net etc, but for UK commercial purposes, the .co.uk version is recommended.<\/p>\n A misapprehension we often see if where a dentist thinks that you buy a domain name outright. You actually can\u2019t do this and you effectively rent it on a defined term basis, typically 2 years, although you can register for much longer. As long as renew in good time, the domain remains yours to use. It goes without saying that you never want to lose \u201cyour\u201d domain so it pays to make sure that things like renewals are scheduled and that you don\u2019t miss doing it. Many is the time when a dentist has called to say his\/her website has gone offline only for us to find that they\u2019d failed to renew their domain registration.<\/p>\n Most dentists prefer that we look after their domain name and indeed we have many hundreds of domains registered and managed on our client\u2019s behalf. Our systems ensure that a domain name can never be lost or expire unexpectedly.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You may have heard your web design, hosting partner or email support guy mention \u201cDNS\u201d \u2013 but what is it and what does it do?<\/p>\n DNS stands for ‘domain name system’ and this is the mechanism which links domain names with IP addresses and \u201croutes\u201d different types of web and email traffic accordingly. DNS comprises of different types of records which each handle different aspects of traffic associated with the domain itself.<\/p>\n I won\u2019t go into too much detail here as it likely won\u2019t be of too much use for you; however it will provide an overview so at least you have a clue what your tech guy is going on about!<\/p>\n When a user plugs a website address into their browser, that address needs to be translated into the IP address of the server which actually hosts the website. There are a number of steps which happen which allow the website to appear on the user\u2019s browser and I won\u2019t detail them all here. Suffice to say that there are 4 DNS servers and 8 DNS \u201clook ups\u201d involved before the website appears! In today\u2019s age of super-fast internet, these web transactions happen extremely quickly and so we\u2019re not left waiting too long before the website we want appears on our device.<\/p>\nDNS \u2013 Domain Name System<\/h3>\n