Anatomy of a modern site: domain, DNS, edge, build, content

When a website goes wrong, the first question is “who do I ring?” The answer depends on which layer failed, and most people have never been shown the layers. There are six between a visitor typing your address and a page appearing on their phone: the domain licence, DNS, the certificate, the edge network, the built files and the content source. By the end you should be able to say which one a problem lives in, which is most of the way to fixing it.

What happens when someone types your address

Mozilla’s developer documentation gives the sequence. First, “The browser goes to the DNS server and finds the real address of the server that the website lives on.” Then “The browser sends an HTTP request message to the server, asking it to send a copy of the website to the client.” The server sends the files back in pieces, and “The browser assembles the small chunks into a complete web page and displays it to you.”^[1]

Every layer below is a piece of that journey. The real address of a server is a number, not a name: “This is called an IP address, and it represents a unique location on the web.”^[1]

Layer 1: the domain licence

Your domain name, for example a .com.au, is not something you own. The .au space is run by auDA, “the Australian not-for-profit organisation responsible for administering the .au domain”^[2]. Its licensing rules are explicit: “A Person does not legally ‘own’ a Domain Name.”^[3] What you hold is a licence, and “Licence Period means a period of 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 years.”^[3]

Two rules from that document matter for a business. You must qualify: “A Person applying for a Licence must: have an Australian Presence”^[3]. And you must keep your details current: “A Person must ensure that their information is complete, true and accurate throughout the Licence Period.”^[3]

The failure at this layer is the expensive one. If the renewal lapses, “the Domain Name will become available to the public on a First Come, First Served basis”^[3]. So check that the contact details on your licence reach somebody who reads them. You deal with a registrar, defined in the rules as a company “accredited by .au Domain Administration as a Registrar”^[3], and the registrar is who you call when the domain itself is in question.

Layer 2: DNS

DNS turns the name into the number. Mozilla’s description is the clearest: “The Domain Name System (DNS) is like an address book for websites. When you type a web address in your browser, the browser looks at the DNS to find the website’s IP address, the actual address the server is located at, before it can retrieve the website.”^[1]

The address book has an owner. For our builds that owner is Cloudflare: “When you onboard your website or application to Cloudflare, Cloudflare becomes the primary authoritative DNS provider for your domain.”^[4] The same address book holds the entries that route your email and any other services on the domain, which is why our launch stage includes the DNS and SSL cut-over and why our inclusions promise that your email and other domain services stay intact. When a site vanishes and the email stops on the same day, the fault is DNS.

Layer 3: the certificate

The padlock in the browser is a certificate, and it belongs to a protocol called TLS, “formerly known as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)”^[5], which is why people still say SSL. Its job is “preventing tampering with and eavesdropping on email, web browsing, messaging, and other protocols”^[5]. Browsers insist on it: “All modern browsers support the TLS protocol, requiring the server to provide a valid digital certificate confirming its identity in order to establish a secure connection.”^[5]

A certificate proves that whoever is serving your site controls your domain. Let’s Encrypt, a certificate authority, explains the check: “the ACME client proves to the Certificate Authority (CA) that the web server controls a domain”, by “Provisioning a DNS record” or placing a file on the site^[6]. Certificates expire, and “Renewing a certificate at a later time means repeating the issuance process over again”^[6]. On a well-run site that renewal is automatic. When it is not, every visitor sees a warning page and the site is effectively down, though nothing was deleted.

Layer 4: the edge network

Your files do not sit on one computer. They sit on a content delivery network, which Mozilla defines as “a group of servers spread out over many locations. These servers store duplicate copies of data so that servers can fulfill data requests based on which servers are closest to the respective end-users.”^[7] Distance matters because “Geographical distance affects latency proportionally.”^[7] A Perth visitor is served from near Perth.

The edge is also the security front door. Cloudflare’s network is a reverse proxy, “a network of servers that sits in front of web servers and either forwards requests to those web servers, or handles requests on behalf of the web servers”^[4]. The point of that arrangement is that “a web site or service never needs to reveal the IP address of their origin servers, which makes it much harder for attackers to leverage a targeted attack against them, such as a DDoS attack”^[4]. This is the edge hosting line in our inclusions: global CDN, automatic SSL, monitored uptime. When the edge provider itself has an outage, many sites go down at once and the owner can only wait; it is worth knowing so nobody spends an afternoon hunting a fault that is not theirs.

Layer 5: the built files

This layer separates a static site from most of what is sold as a website. Our sites are built with Astro, and its reference says what the build command does: “Builds your site for deployment. By default, this will generate static files and place them in a dist/ directory.”^[8] Its documentation describes the input side the same way: “Astro processes, optimizes, and bundles your src/ files to create the final website that is shipped to the browser.”^[9]

What the edge serves is a folder of finished files. There is no database answering each visit, no application server to patch, no plugin waiting for an update. The islands post explains where JavaScript still earns its place in that folder, and the React post covers what it costs. The only server-side code on this site is the form handler, a Cloudflare Pages Function; Pages lets us “deploy server-side code to enable dynamic functionality without running a dedicated server”^[10]. Content is files; the form is one small function.

Cloudflare Pages is the host, built to “Create full-stack applications that are instantly deployed to the Cloudflare global network”^[10]. The domain joins the host through one DNS record: “add a CNAME record for your desired subdomain… This record should point to your custom Pages subdomain”^[11]. If the files are fine but the domain does not show them, that record is where to look.

Layer 6: the content source

The last layer is where the words and images live before they are built. For our sites that is a code repository, and the host watches it: “The Git integration enables automatic builds and deployments every time you push a change to your connected GitHub or GitLab repository.”^[12] Work in progress gets its own address, since “All other branches that are not your production branch will be used for preview deployments.”^[12]

A content change is therefore a recorded, reversible event with a preview before it goes live, and the repository is the true copy of your site: if you ever change suppliers, it is what you hand over. If you want to make edits yourself, we can wire in a lightweight Git-backed CMS so you can change copy and add posts through a simple admin screen; mention it in your brief.

The table to keep

Layer	What it is	Who controls it	What breaks when it fails	Who to call
Domain licence	Your right to use the name for 1 to 5 years[3]	You, through a registrar	Everything, and the name can be taken by someone else[3]	Your registrar
DNS	The address book that maps the name to servers[1]	Whoever runs your nameservers; for our builds, Cloudflare[4]	Site and often email together	Us, or whoever manages DNS
Certificate	Proof the server controls the domain; the padlock[5]	The host, renewed automatically	Red warning page in every browser	Us
Edge network	Copies of your files close to visitors, and the security front door[7]	The edge provider	Many sites at once, briefly	Nobody; wait, then check the provider’s status page
Built files	The finished HTML, CSS, images and script in dist/[8]	Us, via the deployment pipeline	A page missing, a form not sending, a broken layout	Us
Content source	The repository the site is built from[12]	You and us	Nothing live; a change not appearing	Us

Two patterns cover most of it. If the site and the email died together, it is DNS or the domain. If the site loads but something on it is wrong, it is the built files, and it is ours to fix.

What you can do next

Find your domain’s renewal date and the contact details it renews to; that is the one failure in this table that money cannot quickly undo. If you are planning a build and want each of these layers set up and written down in handover notes, the brief builder takes three minutes and comes back with a fixed price. Our own site’s measurements are on the home page.

Reference list

All sources accessed 8 April 2026.

1. MDN (n.d.) How the web works. MDN Web Docs, Mozilla. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_development/Getting_started/Web_standards/How_the_web_works
2. auDA (n.d.) About auDA. .au Domain Administration Ltd. https://www.auda.org.au/about-auda/
3. auDA (n.d.) .au Domain Administration Rules: Licensing. .au Domain Administration Ltd. https://auda.org.au/au-domain-names/au-rules-and-policies/au-domain-administration-rules-licensing-2/
4. Cloudflare (n.d.) How Cloudflare works. Cloudflare Docs. https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/concepts/how-cloudflare-works/
5. MDN (n.d.) Transport Layer Security (TLS). MDN Web Docs Glossary, Mozilla. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/TLS
6. Let's Encrypt (n.d.) How It Works. Internet Security Research Group. https://letsencrypt.org/how-it-works/
7. MDN (n.d.) CDN. MDN Web Docs Glossary, Mozilla. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/CDN
8. Astro (n.d.) CLI Commands: astro build. Astro documentation. https://docs.astro.build/en/reference/cli-reference/#astro-build
9. Astro (n.d.) Project Structure. Astro documentation. https://docs.astro.build/en/basics/project-structure/
10. Cloudflare (n.d.) Cloudflare Pages. Cloudflare Docs. https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/
11. Cloudflare (n.d.) Custom domains. Cloudflare Pages documentation. https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/configuration/custom-domains/
12. Cloudflare (n.d.) Git integration. Cloudflare Pages documentation. https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/get-started/git-integration/