The experience of dealing with editing, adding, or deleting DNS records can be immensely time-consuming. Anyone working in domain management has faced issues, frustration, and delays with processing DNS records, directly or indirectly. Moreover, this scenario is more difficult to handle when DNS records are not managed in-house.
For security reasons, administrators are required to manage third parties’ DNS records. This translates into having to dedicate time and attention to this even during weekends, when email migrations are also convenient.
Moreover, situations such as requesting an SSL certificate, an email migration, or launching a website will add on more DNS management workload to the team. These tasks add up complexity and delays to the whole process, affecting the overall project’s planning and productivity.
Delays and failures at any step of this process will most likely generate problems for customers. These situations create a negative impact on their operations and damage their trust in your service.
At Techfarm, a customer and partner of Openprovider, they are intimately aware of the operational costs of these pains. Techfarm is a Dutch company with over 10 years experience in the industry. Their mission is to help entrepreneurs digitalize their processes, with the objective of boosting efficiency and achieving results in less time.
Having experienced the different faces and intricacies of domain management in-house and with their customers, they decided to find a feasible solution for all parties involved.
Turning issues into insights for solutions
As developers by heart, Techfarm has extensive experience in DNS records management. For over 10 years, they have experienced many different scenarios and inquiries: from system administrators, IT providers, and industry workers, through managing their domains, and by providing hosting and email solutions through its portal.
Techfarm’s managing director, Kees Verspoor, noticed a trend in the increasing complexities the team was experiencing. Techfarm strived hard to find potential solutions on how to solve this problem. After some prototyping and customer feedback, they found the perfect solution on how to manage, share and schedule DNS records.
Using their experience in application development, they developed ctrlDNS. ctrlDNS is a tool allowing you to share a domain with others and manage DNS records without providing the master passwords. This tool makes any DNS transaction easier, as well as very user-friendly,
ctrlDNS in action
ctrlDNS ensures that the DNS zone of a domain name can be safely managed by several people, without sharing complete access or creating usernames. Using this tool therefore deletes all unnecessary steps from the process. The administrator decides who has access to the domain names and sets the rights of permissions. This provides total control at all times.
ctrlDNS profiles allow you to import domain names from different providers, being one of them Openprovider. On top of that, you can add multiple accounts. You can also import all or selected zones, enabling automatic updates as soon as a new registration takes place.
Domains are visible in the ctrlDNS profile in zones that can be shared with other members of the team or with external parties. You can choose to share specific zones or series of them.
ctrlDNS also allows changes to be automatically saved, set, and reviewed before approval, as well as providing permission levels for creating users.
No more working during weekends or nights
Admins can schedule the adding, changing, or deletion of DNS records on a specific day and time. Consequently, this gives them their well-deserved lunchtime, nights, and weekends back.
Furthermore, the tool has been designed to avoid duplicate records, thanks to the multiple DNS records templates. It also allows you to compile all the records on a template, and import them directly. This is yet another advantage,. You can now reduce the time invested in DNS management by eliminating bulk manual entries when using certain sets of DNS records.
Tracking your team’s workload
In addition, ctrlDNS records every action performed on zones, as well also the user performing changes. The log is available on the dashboard. It all changes that are pending approval, as well as invitations to the platform. This feature makes tracking easy for managers, as it is possible to track who has made changes.
All activities about zone sharing are shown on the dashboard, providing detailed information on each zone’s detailed view. Additionally, the dashboard provides an organized view of zones in groups: own zones, accessible zones, and shareable zones with other user accounts.
Easy access through email addresses
There are two ways in which users can access the tool. They can either use another ctrlDNS profile or an a user account based on an email address.
The fact that ctrlDNS makes it possible to share a zone with email address-based accounts is an advantage for companies of any size. This tool is a great option for companies that offer web hosting, domain registration or email solutions.
Visually, the tool offers light and dark modes that can also be switched automatically based on the current time.
ctrlDNS + Openprovider: growing businesses through collaboration
ctrlDNS is a great tool for companies handling DNS zones and are looking for a flexible solution to grant access to all domains or to Openprovider’s platform.
“At this point, we are eager to say that the support we received from Openprovider while developing ctrlDNS is really great. It was a true collaboration”, said Kees Verspoor, Techfarm’s Managing Director.
“First of all, Openprovider service is always stable. Another great thing is that everything can be managed from the admin panel and the API. The API is, among other things, what gives us the ability to manage our DNS via ctrlDNS.”
“Besides, another great advantage of working with Openprovider are their Membership plans. Their fixed prices for domain registrations help us increase our margins, as we are able to offer good prices to our customers. In addition, being invited to their events gets us closer to the latest developments. Here, we get to learn from other customers’ experiences, and we get to know other companies in the industry”, said Kees Verspoor, Techfarm’s Managing Director.