Domains 101
Renting your own corner of the internet — and pointing it at your site. One address-book metaphor and DNS finally makes sense.
What a domain actually is
A name you rent yearly — nobody truly owns a domain; you keep it as long as you keep renewing. You rent it from a registrar(Namecheap, Cloudflare, Vercel Domains…), and it's yours to point at anything: your portfolio today, a completely different project next year. The name and the website are separate things.
The three jobs (sometimes three companies)
This is the concept that untangles everything. Getting a domain live involves three separate jobs, and they don't have to be done by the same company:
Who does what
- registrar — where you rent the name
- DNS host — keeps the address book saying where the name points
- web host — where your site actually lives — Vercel, for us
💡 tipUsually your registrar is also your DNS host, so it feels like one thing. But when an instruction says “add this in your DNS settings,” it means the address book — wherever it lives — not your hosting.
DNS records, in plain English
DNS is the internet's address book: someone types your name, DNS answers “that lives over here.” Records are just entries in that book. You'll meet two:
An A recordsays “this name → this numeric address.” A CNAMEsays “this name → that other name” — like a mail forward (lifeboard.yourdomain.com → cname.vercel-dns.com).
💡 tipYou never have to compose these yourself. Vercel shows you the exact records to add; your job is copy, paste, wait. If a record confuses you, screenshot it and ask Claude what it does.
Subdomains: free apps forever
Anything to the left of your domain — lifeboard.yourdomain.com, recipes.yourdomain.com — is a subdomain. They're unlimited, free, and each one is a single CNAME entry in your address book. One domain purchase covers every project you'll ever ship.
Connecting a domain to Vercel
Add both yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com — Vercel redirects one to the other so both work. The padlock (security certificate) is issued automatically once the records check out.
The two gotchas
⏳It doesn't work yet
DNS changes take minutes to a few hours to spread across the internet (“propagation”). If Vercel still says pending after adding records, the answer is almost always: wait. Check back in an hour before changing anything.
🩹On Cloudflare: the orange cloud
Cloudflare's DNS records have a proxy toggle that defaults to an orange cloud. Click it grey (“DNS only”) for records pointing at Vercel — the proxy blocks Vercel from issuing your security certificate, and your site won't come up until it's off.