A recap of this month’s Tech Tips with Leigh — watch the full video below.

If you’ve ever been confused about where your domain actually “lives,” or had your site or email break right after a change was made, you’re not alone. That confusion almost always comes down to one thing: your domain, your website, and your email can live in three completely different places — and most people don’t find that out until something breaks.

Here’s the full breakdown from this month’s session.

What You Own

Three separate companies are usually involved in running your website, and that’s normal — not a sign anything’s wrong.

• Your domain registrar — the company you bought your domain name from (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains). Think of it as the deed to your address. It doesn’t have to host your website or run your email.
• Your web host — the company that stores your website files and serves your site to visitors (Squarespace, WordPress hosting, Wix). Often a completely different company than your registrar.
• Your email provider — whoever actually runs your inbox (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365). Also often separate from the other two.

Three companies, three jobs, one domain name tying them all together. Problems don’t come from having three companies involved — they come from nobody knowing which one does what.

How It Connects

This is where DNS comes in. Think of DNS as the phone book for the internet — it tells traffic where to go for each part of your domain. Three records matter most:

• The A record points your domain to your website. If it’s wrong, your site doesn’t load.
• The MX record points your domain to your email provider. If it’s wrong, email stops arriving — quietly, usually with no error message at all.
• The TXT record handles verification and security (things like SPF and DKIM). It’s the record most often forgotten during a migration, because it’s invisible until it causes a problem.

Put together: a visitor types your domain → DNS checks the A record → sends them to your host. Someone emails you → DNS checks the MX record → routes it to your inbox. Same domain, two different roads, both controlled by DNS.

What Goes Wrong

Three mistakes come up constantly:

1. Moving hosts without updating DNS. Switching platforms but forgetting to point the A record to the new host. The fix: updating DNS has to be part of every migration checklist, every time.
2. Losing registrar access. Not knowing the login for the account where the domain itself is registered — often because an old employee or past developer set it up. The fix: always know who owns that login, and write it down somewhere safe.
3. Email breaking after a site migration. MX records get wiped or overwritten while someone’s updating DNS for the website. The fix: any time DNS is touched, double-check MX and TXT, not just the A record.

Keep This Somewhere You’ll Actually Use It

We built a free reference guide — Domains Decoded — covering everything above, plus a copyable template so you can save your own account details somewhere permanent instead of digging through old emails. Get your copy here →