Domain Settings (DNS)

This documentation explains how to configure your Domain Owner Contact, your domain's Nameservers, and how you manage your DNS Records. For additional documentation about general domain management, how to register or transfer a domain, please consult Domain Management help doc.

Domain Owner Contact

When registering a domain with us or transferring a domain to Onlime GmbH, your domain is assigned to an owner contact, which by default is based on your customer address. You may then change this owner contact per domain. Either, you can edit an existing owner contact, or you create a new one.

To keep it simple, there's no separate contact handle management interface. You can make any changes directly by editing your domain's owner contact.

Domain Owner

As a customer, you are and will always stay the sole owner of your domains. Onlime GmbH is just the administrative and technical contact, as this is needed for the whole domain management which is handled for you.

You may, at any time, request an Auth-Code (transfer code) to transfer your domain to another registrar. This can be done directly in the domain overview by cancelling the domain registration.

Nameservers

That's where you change the nameservers of your domain. This section is only available if you have registered the domain with us. You could use your own nameservers, some external DNS provider, but we always recommend to use ours:

ns1.onlime.ch
ns2.onlime.ch
ns3.onlime.ch

Like this, you will never need to care about any migrations. If Onlime GmbH ever moves your web or mail servers to a different subnet, or even physically to another datacenter, we will always be prepared to update the customer's DNS records accordingly. If you decide to keep your own nameservers, it's up to you to update them in time.

You can also head to the domain overview and select multiple domains for bulk nameserver editing.

WARNING

If you change your nameservers to external ones (differing from our ns1.onlime.ch, ns2.onlime.ch, ns3.onlime.ch), make sure you disable the DNS zone in the domain overview. You can still make changes to your DNS records in our DNS manager, but to avoid any inconsistencies, you should make sure the whole DNS zone is disabled.

DNS Records

Record Type

The following DNS RR (resource records) can be created/edited in our DNS manager:

DNS RR Type	Description
A	A record The record that holds the IP address of a host.
AAAA	AAAA record The record that holds the IPv6 address for a domain (as opposed to A records, which list the IPv4 address).
CAA	CAA record This is the «certification authority authorization» record, it allows domain owners state which certificate authorities can issue certificates for that domain. If no CAA record exists, then anyone can issue a certificate for the domain. These records are also inherited by subdomains.
CNAME	CNAME record Forwards one domain or subdomain to another domain, does NOT provide an IP address, but a hostname instead.
MX	MX record Directs mail to one or more email servers. The priority assigns a numerical value to each MX record, indicating the order in which email servers should be contacted. Lower values indicate higher priority.
NS	NS record NS stands for "nameserver", and the nameserver record indicates which DNS server is authoritative for that domain.
SRV	SRV record The DNS "service" (SRV) record specifies a host and port for specific services such as voice over IP (VoIP), instant messaging, and so on.
TXT	TXT record Lets you store any text notes in the record. These records are often used for email security (e.g. for SPF/DKIM/DMARC, domain verification, and similar)

Override default DNS records

Unlike other hosters, we don't overwhelm you with a tons of DNS records you never need to care about. We only present you the custom DNS records which you have set up. You can always check the raw DNS zone file right below the DNS record list to see all records. If you want to override a default DNS record, just create one with the same name/type. Simple as that!

On a fresh domain without any custom DNS records, your zonefile basically looks like this (stripped down to the most relevant records):

@			IN	MX	10 mx1.onlime.ch.
@			IN	MX	50 mx2.onlime.ch.

@			IN	TXT	"v=spf1 a mx include:spf.onlime.ch ~all"
_dmarc		IN	TXT	"v=DMARC1; p=none;"

@			IN	CAA	0 issue "letsencrypt.org"
@			IN	CAA	0 issuewild ";"

@			IN	A		46.231.201.209
www			IN	CNAME	web.onlime.ch.

So, if you would like to point your mail server to your own or any cloud-based email service provider, just create one or more MX records and the existing ones will be overridden. We recommend to first lower the TTL of the existing records by copying them with a low TTL below 5mins, and once you're ready for the migration, just modify your prepared custom records and raise the TTL again.

Name

The "name" field is required for most of DNS records (except SRV). Please enter the part (subdomain name) before your domain for which the entry is to be created. For example, if you enter "test", the domain record will be set for test.<YOUR-DOMAIN>.

Special cases:

• * (wildcard) stands for all subdomains before your domain, i.e.: *.example.com (not permitted for MX records)
• @ stands for the bare domain without subdomain part, i.e.: example.com

What does @ stand for?

In DNS syntax, the @ sign always stays for the «bare domain» without the www or any other subdomain part. If you create a DNS record with relaunch as name, this actually stands for relaunch.<YOUR-DOMAIN>, while @ stands for your domain without any prefix.

Please remember that technically, you always need to point your bare domain to a (webserver) IP. The A record pointing to your webserver's IP is there on purpose and it cannot be replaced with a CNAME. But for all subdomain records, feel free to use CNAME which is slightly more flexible.

TTL

The time to live (TTL) contains the time (in seconds) a client can cache the resolved data locally. You can either set a specific TTL per DNS record, or just stick with the default caching time (1h).

We currently offer the following options:

• Default (1h)
• 24 h | 4 h | 1 h | 15 min | 5 min | 1 min

These options should give you enough flexibility.

TIP

If you are not 100% sure about configuring a DNS record correctly, make sure to set it to a low TTL, so you can make further changes in the future without any clients getting stuck on the old value. But once you have set up a DNS record for good, it's advisable to choose a TTL of at least 15mins, preferably 1h.