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Where to Buy Domains and How to Connect Them to Servers

If you search for "buy domain" in any search engine, you'll often see services like Namecheap and GoDaddy at the top. Our advice: avoid these services as they are outdated and focused on upselling. From our experience, the best place to buy a domain is OVH:

  • You get a free API to manage DNS records (where you can link your domain and subdomains to servers), making it easy to offer custom domains to users of your project.
  • Domains aren’t OVH’s main product, which keeps pricing low.
  • The admin panel for managing DNS records is user-friendly.
  • DNS record changes are applied in seconds.
  • DNS Anycast, which helps reduce latency for initial website loads, costs just $1.31/year.
  • WHOIS and personal data protection are included for free (OVH hides domain owner details on services like who.is).
  • OVH offers cheap VPS (cloud servers) with monthly-based plans (you’ll pay for a month even if you only use the VPS for a few hours) - OVH VPS, and no manual account approval is required.

Alternatives to OVH:

  • Cloudflare – Free to start, but it offers fewer domain name options than OVH. Keep in mind, Cloudflare is mainly focused on enterprises with complex pricing models.

What if I already have a domain but the service where I bought it doesn’t offer an API to manage DNS records?
In this case, you can use a service like Cloudflare to connect your domain and manage DNS records via API.

How to Connect Domains to Servers

When you create a server on any cloud provider, you receive a public IP address, which is used to send requests to the server from a browser, mobile app, or other devices. However, remembering IP addresses like "151.115.51.131" can be difficult. That's why we use domains (e.g., turbocloud.dev), which are simply names linked to public IP addresses.

To link a domain to a server, you need to add a DNS record for that domain. Every domain registrar has a section for managing DNS records. To link a domain/subdomain to a server with a public IP address, follow these steps:

  1. Go to the DNS records section in your domain registrar’s dashboard.
  2. Add an A record where:
  3. In the "Name" field, type in the subdomain (or leave it blank if it’s for the main domain).
  4. In the "Target" field, enter the server’s public IP address.

Once you add or change DNS records, you may need to wait for the DNS servers (used by browsers and operating systems) to update. With OVH or Cloudflare, changes usually take about 30-60 seconds, while other services can take up to 24 hours.

You can check if the DNS records have been updated using Google's Dig tool.

How Requests Are Sent

After adding an A record that links your domain to a server’s IP address, your server is ready to receive requests. Here's a simplified flow of how a request from a browser or app reaches your server:

  1. The user types a URL into a browser.
  2. The browser sends a request to a DNS server to retrieve the IP address linked to the domain.
  3. DNS servers are managed by major companies like Google, Cloudflare, etc.
  4. After receiving the IP address, the browser sends a request to your server, including the URL in the request headers.
  5. The server processes the request and returns the necessary data (e.g., HTML) to the browser.
  6. The browser displays the HTML content to the user.

This is the basic request flow, but there are often additional steps involved, which we’ll cover later.