Domains and DNS are the least glamorous part of your technology and among the easiest to lose. They are also, quietly, a security control: the records that decide whether your website resolves, whether your email is delivered, and whether someone else can send invoices that appear to come from you.
North Star manages domains, DNS, certificates and website protection for businesses across the Denver metro area, Colorado Springs and Fort Collins — as part of the same managed service that covers the rest of your environment, rather than as a separate account nobody quite owns.
This is the first question worth answering, and a surprising number of businesses cannot.
Domains are routinely registered by whoever built the website — a web designer, a marketing agency, an employee who has since left — under their own account and their own email address. It works fine until you need to move hosting, change providers, or fix a mail problem urgently, and discover that the person who can authorise it no longer works there, no longer trades, or is no longer on good terms with you.
Your domain should be registered to your business, with your legal entity as the registrant and renewal notices going to an address more than one person can read. We establish where a domain actually sits as part of onboarding, and where it is sitting somewhere awkward, we help you get it back before it becomes urgent.
The related failure is expiry. A domain lapses because the renewal notice went to a mailbox nobody monitors, and the website and every email address on it stop working at the same moment. Domains under management are monitored and auto-renewed, with registrar-lock enabled so a transfer cannot be initiated without authorisation.
Most businesses think of DNS as the thing that points a domain at a website. It does considerably more than that, and the records that matter most are the ones nobody looks at.
Three DNS records govern whether the rest of the world believes an email claiming to be from your domain. SPF lists which servers are permitted to send on your behalf. DKIM adds a cryptographic signature proving a message was not altered in transit. DMARC tells receiving mail servers what to do when a message fails those checks — and, just as usefully, sends you reports on who is attempting to send as you.
Configured properly, these make it substantially harder for an attacker to spoof your domain in an invoice fraud attempt against your own customers. Configured loosely — or set to monitor-only and forgotten, which is the common state — they provide the appearance of protection without the substance. Major mailbox providers have also tightened their requirements for bulk senders, so businesses that never had these records correct are increasingly finding legitimate mail rejected.
This is closely tied to managed Microsoft 365, since your mail platform and your DNS have to agree with each other, and to the human side covered in our phishing guide.
TLS certificates secure the connection between visitors and your site. They also expire, usually at an inconvenient moment, and an expired certificate produces a full-page browser warning telling visitors your site is unsafe. Certificates under management are renewed automatically and monitored rather than diarised.
DNS is one of the few places where a single mistyped record takes an entire business offline, and where a hijacked registrar account lets an attacker redirect both your website and your email. Access is limited, changes are documented, and multi-factor authentication is enforced on the account.
For clients who want it, we place a protective layer in front of the website rather than leaving the origin server directly exposed to the internet. Delivered from a global edge network, it provides:
We are deliberately vendor-neutral about which platform delivers this. The market consolidates and rebrands constantly, and what we commit to is the capability rather than a product name. We are glad to walk through the current toolset during an assessment.
We help clients choose hosting that suits the site they actually have, and keep the unglamorous maintenance happening: platform and plugin updates applied on a schedule, backups of the site itself rather than just the server, uptime monitoring so you learn a site is down from us rather than from a customer, and a documented record of where everything lives.
An unmaintained website is one of the more common ways a small business gets compromised, and an abandoned plugin is a genuinely dangerous thing to leave running on a public server.
We support organizations across Colorado’s Front Range, including Denver, Aurora, Lakewood, Arvada, Westminster, Thornton, Northglenn, Broomfield, Commerce City, Brighton, Centennial, Greenwood Village, Englewood, Littleton, Highlands Ranch, Parker, Castle Rock, Golden, Wheat Ridge, Colorado Springs, Monument, Fountain, Fort Collins, Loveland, Windsor and Greeley, along with the surrounding communities and clients running remote and hybrid teams.
A public WHOIS lookup shows the registrar and, usually, an administrative contact — though privacy services mask the details. The more reliable route is to establish which account holds it and who can log in. If nobody in your business can answer that, treat it as a task rather than a curiosity; it is much easier to resolve calmly than during an outage.
Your website stops resolving and every email address on that domain stops working, usually at the same moment. There is generally a grace period during which it can be recovered, sometimes with a redemption fee, but once a lapsed domain is registered by someone else the options narrow considerably. Auto-renewal and monitored contact details avoid the situation entirely.
They are DNS records that let receiving mail servers verify a message genuinely came from your domain. You need them for two reasons: they make it harder for an attacker to impersonate your business to your own customers, and major mailbox providers increasingly reject or filter mail from domains without them. Most businesses have some of this configured partially, which provides less protection than it appears to.
Usually yes, and we will tell you when leaving it where it is makes more sense. What matters is not which registrar holds it but that your business is the registrant, the contact details are monitored, auto-renewal is on, and someone is watching the records. Transfers are planned so mail and web traffic are unaffected.
Design and content are not our trade, and we work alongside whoever handles yours. What we take responsibility for is the infrastructure underneath — domain, DNS, certificates, protection, hosting and maintenance — so your designer can focus on the site rather than on why email stopped arriving.
We will tell you who holds your domain, when it renews, whether your email authentication records are doing anything useful, and whether your certificate is about to expire. Most businesses are surprised by at least one of the answers. This forms part of our communications and web services, alongside business phone systems, and sits on the same secured foundation as our managed IT and cybersecurity services.
Call 303-552-0018 or book a time below.
