HMG Recommends Cloudflare for DNS Hosting

We strongly recommend that you take the opportunity to move your DNS hosting to Cloudflare.  In fact, we feel so strongly about it, we will do it for you at no cost to you.  All you have to do is provide your login credentials for your current DNS provider (usually wherever you registered your domain name.)

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:

Q. So, why do you want to move my DNS?

• DNS is hard! But it is how people find your website. Think of DNS as the phone book of the internet, and when your DNS is down or not working right, no one can find your website. When a website moves to a new host, the address in the DNS “phone book” has to be updated so the website can be found at the new address.
  
  We are moving your website to WP Engine, and that means it will have a new address. You will need to change your DNS, and we want to make it as easy as possible for you. You may not know where your DNS is located, how to login, or how to make updates once you do log in. And you don’t want to make a DNS mistake, or your website will get lost in the internet abyss until you get the DNS fixed.
  
  Haley Marketing will help you find your DNS, and then we will take care of it for you. We will set up your DNS at Cloudflare, which will make it easy to update in the future. And, it will be in a Cloudflare account that is setup for you, so you retain access if you, or your tech partners, need to access it someday.

Q. Why Cloudflare?

• There are several really big advantages to hosting your DNS at Cloudflare:
  
  1. It’s free. Cloudflare does have paid accounts for some of their advanced services (such as hosting your own custom cert, custom nameservers, etc.), but 99% of our clients do not need these and the free account works great.
  
  2. It includes site caching which will make your site fly! Assets such as images and pages that are loaded frequently will sit in memory on Cloudflare, so the server doesn’t need to be accessed to display them. So much faster, you’ll be surprised.
  
  3. Not only faster but more reliable. If your site goes down for some reason, the cached version can still be seen.
  
  4. Mitigation of DDoS attacks. You might think that no one would attack your website, but distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks happen all the time. Several of our clients have experienced these attacks, and they are not fun! With a DDoS attack, your website gets flooded with so much traffic that the server can no longer respond. Not only does your site go offline, but our engineers and your techs are locked out as well. Cloudflare protects you by standing in front of your site and fending off these attacks for you – and it works really well. (That’s experience talking!)

Q. What will it cost?

• It won’t cost you anything extra for the services you are currently receiving. If you would like to add SSL, and we strongly suggest you do, then it will be $15/month more for hosting. Otherwise, you’ll continue to get billed the way you are now.

Q. How much work do I need to do?

• Other than giving us login to your current DNS provider, you won’t have to do anything. Team Haley will take care of all the heavy work and downtime will be minimal to none.

Q. How much downtime will there be?

• Fingers crossed but there should be none. For CYA purposes, we will say outages will be minimal (15-30 minutes at most.)

Q. Are you taking over my email?

• No, Haley Marketing does not offer email hosting and we will not be taking that service over for you. You need to maintain your email hosting account where it is now. In the future, if you change your email vendor, we will happily assist you with DNS changes or provide access to your Cloudflare account so you can make the necessary changes.

Q. Are you taking over my domain? Will you become the domain registrar?

• No, we strongly believe that a domain (e.g., yourcompanyname.com) is a valuable asset of your company and, as such, you should retain control over your registrar account. The domain registrar is the online company where you signed up for your domain (like Godaddy, Register.com, Network Solutions or dozens of other companies.) Please make sure you renew your domain when your registrar notifies you that it is about to expire, or better yet, set up auto-renew with your registrar.