Home/Notes/A records: a field note from a dental office
A records: a field note from a dental office
29 Jun 2025
How a dental office deals with A records — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: query-string copies of the same page. This is where A records breaks for a dental office.
Early on we tried to automate A records for a dental office with a cron job. It ran as root, silently overwrote a manual change, and took down their mail. Lesson learned.
The chain of trust for A records starts at the registrar. If the registrar account uses an email nobody reads, every downstream fix is temporary.
Launch day for a dental office is usually light. Week three is when leftover tags, fonts, and staging URLs show up. query-string copies of the same page is the usual passenger.
Instead of migrating A records all at once, we ran both configurations in parallel for a week. The switch happened on a Wednesday morning — the quietest traffic window.
a dental office asked us to look at A records after a customer screenshot showed a browser warning. The fix took eleven minutes; finding the cause took two hours.
The hosting bill for a dental office is twelve dollars a month. Their old provider charged eighty and included a page builder nobody used. A records was broken on both plans.
We run a monthly diff on DNS for a dental office. If a record changes and nobody in the team made the change, we get an alert. query-string copies of the same page was caught this way last quarter.
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