Question 6

Explain, in a couple of paragraphs, what you think 2 major challenges around DNS configuration are for less-technical customers hosting websites.

I've done some debugging of DNS for either StackOverflow or community users on Netlify.

The biggest and hardest DNS issue in my opinion has to be the timing issue of DNS entries being propogated. In a lot of cases a less-technical user isn't aware of how routing tables are updated on the internet. These updates to their DNS entries can become confusing, because a correct change in the table might make them think the change did not work. This can be a frustrating issue for a person when they have tried everything and they keep seeing no change.

The other challenge a less-technical customer might have is moving a domain over to a different hosting provider. These updating of name servers can be confusing also. They might enter both their old NS provider along with the Netlify names. Also there is a caching here that might get confusing seeing no update of their site to the Netlify site.

Documenting this process has challenges for Netlify or any hosting provider due to so many different admin applications. This can add to the two challenges listed above.