Donaldson R F
DNS, Security & Integrations
Fix DNS Misconfiguration
Diagnose and fix a tangled or broken DNS setup causing your site or email to behave unpredictably.
The Problem
Your domain's DNS has accumulated conflicting, duplicate, or leftover records from past changes, migrations, or guesswork, and something — the website, email, or both — is behaving inconsistently as a result.
About this problem
DNS records tend to accumulate over time without anyone doing a proper clean sweep — an old hosting provider's A record left behind after a migration, duplicate MX records from two different email setups, or a CNAME conflicting with another record on the same hostname. Individually these might not cause an obvious error, but together they can cause intermittent, hard-to-diagnose problems that look unrelated to DNS at first glance.
This usually gets found during a migration, a troubleshooting session for an unrelated problem, or a general health check that turns up unexpected legacy records.
What's Included
- A full audit of every DNS record currently published for your domain
- Identifying conflicting, duplicate, or clearly obsolete records
- Correcting the configuration to a clean, consistent state
- Verifying website and email both work correctly after the cleanup
What's NOT Included
- Changing DNS provider or registrar as part of the fix
- Fixing issues that turn out to be unrelated to DNS once properly diagnosed
- Ongoing DNS record management after the cleanup
How It Works
- Pull a full export of every currently published DNS record for the domain.
- Cross-reference each record against what's actually needed (current hosting, current mail provider, active third-party services).
- Identify and flag anything conflicting, duplicate, or clearly leftover from a previous setup.
- Make corrections carefully, one category at a time (website records, then mail records, then everything else), to avoid breaking something that was actually working.
- Verify website and email functionality fully after each category of change, not just at the very end.
In practice: you buy the service, send over whatever access or details the job needs, I investigate and do the work, and you confirm it's resolved before we call it done.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How do I know if my DNS is misconfigured?
- Signs include inconsistent website loading, emails bouncing or going missing intermittently, SSL warnings that come and go, or a hosting/email provider flagging unexpected records during their own setup checks.
- Can a DNS misconfiguration break my email without affecting my website?
- Yes, since email (MX records) and website (A/CNAME records) are controlled by different record types — one can be broken while the other works fine.
- Is it risky to change DNS records that might be in use?
- It can be, which is why changes are made carefully and verified at each step rather than all at once, to catch anything that turns out to still be needed.
- How long does a DNS cleanup take to show results?
- The changes themselves take minutes, but full propagation and confirmation that everything's stable can take a few hours.
- Will fixing DNS misconfiguration cause downtime?
- Properly sequenced changes shouldn't cause meaningful downtime, though a brief window during propagation is normal for any DNS change.
- Can old DNS records from a previous website owner cause problems?
- Yes, this is common with domains that changed hands or were previously used for something else — leftover records from the old setup can conflict with the new one.