Domains, zones, and services
Almost everything in the panel builds on three ideas:
| Idea | What it is |
|---|---|
| Domain | A name, e.g. www.example.com. |
| Zone | The container your domains live in, with the authority to answer DNS for them. |
| Service | The job a domain does: serve a website, receive mail, answer DNS. |
Domain: a name
example.com, www.example.com, mail.example.com, and
app.staging.example.com are all domains, and the panel treats them all the
same way. A domain exists automatically when you create a service on it.
A domain is not a website. On its own, example.com serves nothing,
receives no mail, and doesn't resolve. It does nothing until you attach a
service to it.
Zone: where your domains live
A DNS zone is example.com plus the authority to answer for every name
under it. It holds your DNS records, and it's where you work: you create
domains in it, attach services to them, and edit its records.
www.example.com and mail.example.com are domains inside the
example.com zone. They can't exist outside one.
Services shows this directly: it opens on a zone and lists the domains
under it. The picker at the top switches between zones, e.g. example.com
and example.net.
The panel won't attach a service to a name outside a zone you hold. That's
why you type shop, not shop.example.com, when creating a service.
Your hosting provider sets up a zone when the domain is added to your account. You can't create or delete zones from the panel; you build inside the ones you have.
Service: what a domain does
| Service | What it does |
|---|---|
| Website | Serves files, and applications through mounts. |
| Lets the domain's addresses send and receive email. Required for domain accounts on the domain. | |
| Mail Server | The access side of email: the name webmail runs on and mail apps connect to. |
| Identity Provider | Makes the domain a sign-in endpoint for your domain users and apps. |
| DNS zone | Makes the domain answer DNS. |
A domain can carry several services at once: example.com can be a website,
receive mail, and answer DNS. And the same kind of service can run on many
domains; each name with a Website service is its own site.
This explains something that looks odd at first. The zone is itself a
service, sitting on the name it's named after. So example.com carries the
zone service and is a domain inside that zone, which is why it appears in
its own list of names.
What a new zone comes with
You rarely start from scratch. A new zone for example.com comes with:
- a DNS zone service on
example.com(the zone itself) - a Website service on
example.com - a Website Alias on
www.example.com, pointing to that site - a Mail service on
example.com - a Mail Server service on
mail.example.com - an Identity Provider service on
accounts.example.com
So a new zone already serves a website and handles email, and you can go
straight to your content and your first
domain users. You only add services to go beyond
this, usually a website or mail on another domain such as
shop.example.com.
Coming from another panel
| Elsewhere | Here |
|---|---|
| "Addon domain" | Another zone, with a Website service on its domain. |
| "Parked domain" or "alias domain" | A Website Alias service pointing to an existing site. |
| "Webmail URL" | The domain with the Mail Server service. |
| "Domain", meaning the DNS zone | A zone. Here, "domain" means the name itself. |
Many tools say "domain" for the zone and have no word for the names inside it. Here the container is the zone, and each name in it is a domain.
Lifecycle
Creating a service does real work: the panel publishes DNS, requests certificates, and configures the web or mail server. Removing a service undoes it. A domain with no services and no domain accounts disappears with its last service.
Changes apply in the background within a few moments, so a page may show a change as pending for a short while.