Here is a great link about all those DNS questions in plain English!

http://www.dnsknowledge.com/whatis/authoritative-name-server/

Here are a couple of quick snippets of the more frequently used NS commands to help troubleshoot those dreaded DNS issues.

Get the authoritative server names and IP addresses for your domain:

(replace “belchamber.us” with your domain of course)

In your server shell at the command line, type this command to get your NS information

host -t ns belchamber.us
To troubleshoot DNS issues and get get your In Windows, go to Start, then type “cmd”, then at the prompt, type:

nslookup -q=mx belchamber.us

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For those who have installed Ubuntu on VMWare, you have to DISABLE the “CD/DVD” drive from your options or it will boot to the install menu each time.

If you encounter the Ubuntu install menu after you install Ubuntu, you can bypass it by hitting the “Esc” key then move the arrows down and select “Boot from first hard disk” above.

Just go to your virtual machine and right click “Settings” then go to “System” and uncheck  .  This does not seem to be anywhere in the documentation and may seem obvious, but if you like to start your web server up then come back in a minute and expect it ready to go, you won’t have to wade through the Ubuntu start up menu.

Ubuntu is the most popular Linux-based software platform.  It gives a Linux machine real legs.  It’s amazing what the open source community has encouraged in innovations in web technologies.  It will only exponentially increase as costs for computers and web access keep going down.  I can’t help but be grateful, and humbled, by the extraordinary efforts of those who provide these incredibly powerful tools, many at little or no cost.  So, support your open-source programmers and providers — donate and spread the word.  If you use open-source software, rave about it!

After all, it’s hard to complain when you get all this software and it only costs you time to learn it.  The things you can do, the tools and solutions you can provide.  It’s an amazing age we live in!

– Aaron Belchamber

When you are working on your website, you frequently visit it so your browser caches a lot of content.  If you’re not careful, it’s easy to assume what YOU experience on your browser is how the rest of the world will experience it.  NEVER assume and clear your browser’s cookies and cache, also called “Temporary Files”.  Test your site in different browsers and on different devices frequently.  Often, different browsers will display pages differently and you may find pages don’t display at all in Google Chrome but fine in Firefox.

Using an independent website tool to check the status of your site and certain pages is critical to making sure you find potential issues with your website before your visitors encounter them.  This will give you time to fix issues so the UX — “user experience” is optimal.  Remember, if your site loads slowly or shows other issues, people will leave.  The more frequently such a bad experience happens the more the chance that they will also never come back.  That’s bad for traffic and worse for your business.

I suggest going to Pingdom and test your own website.  It’s a pretty straight forward process as you will just need to enter your domain name in the field and click “Test Now”.  They go pretty deep with their analytics and have other options to also test your website’s DNS records, too.  To make sure your site, server and DNS records are all optimized, this is another step that you should add in your web development deployment and maintenance checklist.

If Pingdom detects any issues with your site, these tools will help you pinpoint the problem areas, like a slow-loading image or a Javascript library that takes too long to load.  The issues Pingdom’s tools detect will then help you resolve them.  You can even subscribe and have Pingdom monitor your website to ensure it is up and running and it will also alert you by email or text if there is something wrong with your website.  For e-commerce and websites critical to your company’s profit model, this is a small investment to stay on top of your website.

Your customer’s really happy with the latest website you deployed as their web developer.  One day, they contact you and complain the website is sluggish, it’s even timing out.

So you check the error logs and notice a few fatal errors, but those scripts were exceeding the timeout limit.  Probably because something else is slowing down the site.

So you check the “slow query MySQL logs” and find nothing.  One query three weeks ago — oh yeah, that was a test query for a report during dev.  What the heck is going on?!

What scripts were changed since it started acting sluggish?  You check the latest code commits in your Git repository (or SVN) and see they indeed had made quite a few changes and alterations to the code you had left them with.

Hmmmm, but the logs weren’t showing any “smoking guns”.  Chance are, during page load the order of certain resources have changed and things that could be loaded asynchronously are loading synchronously so one resource, like the JQuery library and a few JQuery plug-ins and perhaps a social widget are all loading synchronously on the page.  Of course, the order of resources being loaded matters, especially when one resource depends on the other, like JQuery.  You can’t load a JQuery plug-in or execute custom JQuery code without loading the JQuery library first.

So here are 3 basic rules that can help you get out of a jam quickly:

1. Combine and minify as much CSS as possible and have it loaded after any meta-tags but before any other tags within the page’s <<head>> tag.
2. Combine and minify your JS into two groups — synchronous and asynchronous.
   • Then have the JS scripts load as late as possible on the page, often just before the close <<html>> tag
3. Lastly, check the images, very frequently customers will add new images and they won’t be optimized.
   • Combining images into a single images and “slicing” them with CSS is much more efficient.  Google “sprites” and while you’re at it, make sure you are optimizing your images by tailoring the format and compression for optimal display and load time.