Years ago, I ran a humble web hosting company called Web Surf Hawaii. I was fully immersed in the web back then and an eager beaver to learn everything I could about the net.
As part of my hosting learning process I resolved to take control of everything from DNS records on down to creating web pages. So, I bought myself a copy of DNS and BIND
It was a powerful thing to be able to harness control over domains. If I wanted a subdomain, I just made it happen. I didn’t have to file a ticket with my host or even use their web interface. I can’t even recall what that process was like back then, honestly.
Once I gave up Web Surf Hawaii, around 2001, I stopped monkeying around with DNS records and moved on to other things.
Now that I’ve got something brewing around hosting rivers of news, my interest and need for control over my domains has resurfaced. I wanted to point a subdomain to my EC2 server and had to file a ticket with my host in order to accomplish it. Hmph. Thankfully, my host suggested that I should give CloudFlare a try if I wanted more control over my domains. I took a look and was impressed. In one fell swoop, I transferred my DNS records for ten domains over to CloudFlare. Now, I’m creating A records and marveling at the power of doing it myself once again.
CloudFlare does much more than I had imagined. All I wanted was to be able to create my own A records but CloudFlare can help me with so much more like monitoring traffic, keeping spammers at bay, speeding up my sites, and more.
It feels good to be back in charge again. Filing a ticket to have someone else do something I can do myself is silly. Time to get my chops back in order.