We provide nameservers for every domain on our system for ease of use, however if you plan to build a large private blog network we highly recommend mixing up the nameservers you use.
Although we think the nameservers we offer provide a fair degree of cover, it can't be ignored that the vast majority of domains on the web don't use a public nameserver service at all! In fact, the most common state for any domain is for it to use it's registrar's own nameservers - you can see this at Builtwith.com :
So to keep your sites as private as possible, we recommend you don't use our nameserver services for every domain you create!
Instead, we provide a CNAME for every CDN service we generate, which you can use with your own registrar's nameservers to keep mixing up the patterns as you grow your network.
How to configure your domains using a CNAME
The exact process to setup a CNAME varies from registrar to registrar - here are the links to the instructions for some top registrars:
In short, what you need to do is to remove existing A records that might point to the registrar's parking page, and add an A record that looks similar to this:
www CNAME cnamedomain.cdn.com
Essentially, what this means is 'when looking up the address for www.mydomain.com, refer instead to the address for cnamedomain.cdn.com'
This way each time a browser requests the IP address of your site they receive a dynamic IP.
What about root domains?
Unfortunately the DNS standards haven't kept pace with the changes in the web, and it is generally not possible to set 'a CNAME for 'domain.com' without a subdomain, with most registrars refusing to add the record. Instead this can be handled in two ways.
1. Use the registrar's web redirect system to redirect from non-www to www.domain.com - since all requests are redirected to a dynamic IP this keeps things unique
2. Some registrars allow what is sometimes called an ALIAS or ANAME record. In this case the registrar will look up the address THEY get when requesting the CNAME, and create a kind of fake A record based on the results they get. This can be effective but does mean you are more likely to be returned IP addresses local to the registrar's server - ie from a smaller pool. We recommend still pairing this with a redirect served by our system so your website itself is still served from a dynamic IP.
Isn't there an easier way?
Funnily enough, there is - we are integrating APIs for several top registrars which means we can handle the configuration of your domains for you. Not all registrars offer this capability, but we already have 3 registars setup including Namecheap. Read our guide on how to set up your account to enable auto-configuration.