/ Guides
Things we had to work out properly
Written so that somebody who wants to do it themselves can. Each one is a problem we actually hit, not a topic chosen because people search for it.
Email deliverability/5 min
Why your business email goes to spam, and what actually fixes it
You bought a domain, set up an inbox, sent your first invoice — and it landed in junk. Nothing is broken. The domain simply has not told the receiving server that you are allowed to send from it, and there are exactly three records that do that.
DNS/6 min
The DNS records a small business actually needs
A registrar's DNS panel offers about twenty record types. A business running a website and email needs five of them, and three of those exist only to stop your mail being treated as forgery. Here is what each one does and what goes wrong when it is missing.
Domains/6 min
Who actually owns your domain, and how to check in two minutes
Paying for a domain is not the same as being its registrant. Plenty of businesses discover the difference only when they try to leave — and the person who registered it on their behalf is unreachable, or no longer friendly.
Email deliverability/5 min
Moving your email to a new provider without losing messages
Changing MX records is one edit. Doing it without losing a day of mail takes three steps in a specific order, and the messages that go missing all go missing in the same gap — between the moment the old mailbox stops being watched and the moment the new one starts receiving.
Email deliverability/5 min
Moving DMARC from p=none to p=quarantine without losing mail
p=none protects nothing. It is a listening post, and leaving one running for a year is the most common way a well-configured domain stays forgeable. Here is how to read the reports it produces and when it is actually safe to tighten.
Monitoring/5 min
Why your uptime monitor says everything is fine while nobody can buy
An uptime check asks a server whether it is answering. A customer asks whether they can complete a purchase. Those are different questions, and a shop can fail the second for days while passing the first every minute.
Monitoring/6 min
Your contact form is broken and nobody is going to tell you
A form that fails loudly gets fixed the same day. The expensive kind shows the visitor a thank-you message and then drops the enquiry, and the only signal is that the phone is quieter than usual — which looks exactly like a slow month.