Quick one before your coffee goes cold.
Somebody once phoned me on a Friday afternoon because their website had “disappeared.” It hadn’t. The site was fine, humming away on its server, perfectly healthy. What had actually happened was that a well-meaning person at their old provider had changed one line of DNS, and the internet had quietly stopped knowing where to find them.
Took eleven minutes to fix. Took them two days of panic to find someone who could.
That’s DNS. It’s the least glamorous part of your website and one of the few things that can take the whole lot down. So here’s what it is, in plain English — and why we route pretty much every client domain through Cloudflare.
So what actually is DNS?
DNS stands for Domain Name System. Think of it as the internet’s address book.
Computers don’t understand hollerdigital.com. They understand numbers — an IP address like 192.0.2.41. DNS is the translation layer in between. Someone types your domain, their computer asks a DNS server “right, where does this one actually live?”, gets the number back, and off they go.
Translation: DNS is the difference between “the shop exists” and “anyone can find the shop.”
The whole exchange usually happens in a few hundredths of a second, hundreds of times a day, and you’ve never once thought about it. Which is exactly how it should be.
The records worth knowing about
Your domain has a handful of DNS records doing different jobs. You don’t need to memorise these, but knowing they exist makes the next conversation with your web person a lot shorter:
- A record — points your domain at the server your website lives on. The main one.
- CNAME — an alias. Points one name at another name. Usually how
www.works. - MX records — where your email goes. Completely separate from your website.
- TXT records — little notes for other systems. SPF, DKIM and DMARC live here, and they’re what tell Gmail your emails are genuinely from you.
That fourth one is the sleeper. Most of the “our emails keep going to spam” problems we inherit aren’t email problems at all — they’re three missing DNS records that nobody set up properly when the domain was registered in 2014.
Why DNS is boring right up until it isn’t
Here’s the thing about the address book: if it’s wrong, nothing else matters.
Your site can be beautifully built, fast, secure, backed up hourly — and if a DNS record points at a server you left two years ago, your visitors get an error page. Your donors get an error page. Your board chair, who checks the site precisely once a quarter, gets an error page.
Three ways it goes wrong in real life:
The move that half-happened. You switch hosts, the website record gets updated, the email records don’t. Site’s fine. Email is now going to a server nobody’s logged into since the Trudeau government’s first term.
The domain nobody owns. The registrar login belongs to a contractor who stopped answering emails in 2019. Nothing’s broken today. But nothing can be changed either, and renewal is a fun surprise waiting to happen.
The slow change. DNS answers get cached for a set period called the TTL — an instruction that says “don’t check again for X minutes.” Sensible is five minutes to an hour. Some providers still default to a full day, which means a five-second fix takes 24 hours to reach everyone. That’s a long day when your donation page is the thing that’s down.
None of these are exotic. We see all three most months.
Right — so where does Cloudflare come in?
Cloudflare sits between your visitors and your server. Every request for your website goes to them first and gets checked before it’s passed along — and if they’ve already got a copy of the page cached, it never touches your server at all. (Email is the exception. Your MX records still point straight at Google or Microsoft, as they should.)
If DNS is the address book, Cloudflare is the front desk: it manages the address book and decides who gets through the door.
We put client domains there for four reasons.
1. It stops the traffic you don’t want
The internet is a rougher neighbourhood than most business owners realise. In the first half of 2026 alone, Cloudflare blocked 23.2 million network-layer denial-of-service attacks — attacks designed purely to knock a site offline by flooding it. That’s around 5,300 an hour, every hour.
And they’re fast. Over 90% finish in under ten minutes, some in under a minute. Cloudflare’s own report makes the point better than I can: by the time an alert reaches a human being, the attack is already over.
Translation: you can’t defend against this by hand. It has to be automatic, and it has to already be switched on.
Most of what Cloudflare blocks isn’t a dramatic attack, mind you. It’s the constant background hum — bots probing your WordPress login, scrapers hammering your search page, junk traffic that costs you server resources and shows up in your analytics as phantom visitors. Filtering that out is underrated, and if your host bills by bandwidth or visits, it’s money you’re currently spending on robots.
2. It makes your site faster in the places that count
Cloudflare has servers in 348 cities, and roughly 95% of the world’s connected population sits within 50 milliseconds of one. They keep adding locations, which keeps shortening that.
Two things happen because of that. Your DNS lookups resolve from somewhere close by, so that first invisible handshake gets quicker. And static bits of your site — images, stylesheets, fonts — get cached at that nearby location instead of travelling back to the origin server every time.
For an Alberta business with Alberta visitors, that’s a modest win. For an association with members across the country, or a foundation running a campaign that suddenly gets shared nationally, it’s the difference between a site that holds up and a site that folds.
And speed isn’t a vanity metric. Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal, and every extra second costs you people who never told you they left. Caching is one of the cheapest wins available — but it’s the floor, not the ceiling. It won’t rescue a site with no keyword strategy behind it, which is a different job and the one our Edmonton SEO services exist to do.
3. It hides your actual server
This one’s quietly important. With Cloudflare in front, the outside world sees Cloudflare’s IP address, not your server’s.
Pair that with a server firewall that only accepts traffic from Cloudflare, and the attacks that would have hit your server hit their network instead. You can’t kick down a door you can’t find.
Worth saying: switching the proxy on isn’t enough on its own — origin addresses leak through old DNS records and certificate logs if nobody locks the server down too. That second step is the one that gets skipped.
4. It gives you back control
Everything DNS-related lives in one place, changes take effect across Cloudflare’s network in seconds instead of waiting on a slow registrar, and short TTLs mean the rest of the internet catches up in minutes rather than days. SSL certificates renew themselves without anyone having to remember.
That last one matters more than it sounds. An expired SSL certificate throws a full-screen browser warning that says, in effect, this site is not safe. It’s a five-minute fix that costs you a week of trust — and it’s usually noticed by exactly the wrong person, at exactly the wrong moment.
The honest caveats
I’d rather tell you where this stops.
Cloudflare is not a security strategy on its own. It’s a very good front door on a building that still needs the locks changed. Out-of-date WordPress plugins, a weak admin password, no backups — Cloudflare won’t save you from any of those.
It’s not a fix for a slow site. If your homepage loads twelve unoptimised images and a page builder full of things nobody scrolls to, a CDN just delivers the mess more efficiently. Fix the site, then add the network.
And it’s not magic uptime. Cloudflare has had its own outages. Any single point in the chain can wobble. What it does is remove far more failure modes than it introduces — which, in this business, is about the best deal you’ll get.
What this looks like on our side
Honestly? You shouldn’t have to think about any of this. That’s the point.
Every site on one of our hosting and support plans gets managed DNS as part of the deal — records documented, TTLs set sensibly, SPF/DKIM/DMARC actually configured so your email lands in inboxes instead of spam folders. Cloudflare handles the security and performance layer. Canadian servers handle the hosting, so your data stays under Canadian jurisdiction, which your board will ask about eventually.
The monitoring runs around the clock — agents watching uptime, threats and server health continuously, escalating to a person when something needs an actual judgement call. Most weeks, the interesting stuff gets sorted before anyone notices it happened.
And when you do need something changed, you talk to the person who’s already been inside your website. Not a queue.
The one thing to do this week
Find out who controls your domain.
Not your website — your domain. Log into your registrar. If you can’t, or you don’t know which company it is, or the account is in a former employee’s name, that’s your weekend project. Everything else on this page is downstream of that one login.
Not sure where yours stands? Our free website audit checks your DNS, hosting, speed, security and backups, and comes back in plain English — no jargon, no sales pitch, just what’s actually going on.
Want the quick version instead? Book a 15-minute Zoom and I’ll look it up with you on the call.
