Show HN: JavaScript widget to help your customers set up DNS records

Greetings, founder here.

I got the idea for DNS Helper when doing customer support at SSLMate. One of the most common customer support issues was publishing the DNS record for SSL certificate validation. When helping customers, I learned some surprising things:

* Many people don't know where their domain's DNS is hosted. Sometimes, they log in to one provider and see their domain listed there, but the NS record is pointed to a different provider, so they end up adding the record in the wrong place.

* DNS provider interfaces are horribly standardized: e.g. do you include the domain name with the record name or is it added for you automatically? Is the value of a record called the "value", the "target", or the "answer"? Do you include a trailing dot with a CNAME target or not? This makes it hard to provide generic instructions for how to add a DNS record.

SSLMate is not the only company that needs customers to add DNS records: any SaaS company that supports vanity domains also has this problem (e.g. a service like Wordpress that lets you host a blog at a subdomain like blog.example.com). Right now, companies typically handle this by writing knowledgebase articles for a handful of the most popular DNS providers. But companies don't have the bandwidth to write and maintain instructions for more than a few providers, and if a customer makes a mistake adding a record they have to open a customer support ticket, or worse, they bounce during onboarding.

Enter DNS Helper. If you need a customer to add a DNS record, you just call a JavaScript function with the record details. DNS Helper detects the DNS provider (114 different providers are recognized) and pops up a modal with instructions. For the 17 most popular providers, DNS Helper has specific instructions; for the others, it provides generic instructions (I plan to add specific instructions for more providers). Then the user can click a button to check if the record has been added. DNS Helper detects common mistakes, like omitting a trailing dot, or adding the wrong type of record, and tells the user how to fix them. Once the record is correctly added, you can have DNS Helper invoke a JavaScript callback so you can take some action, such as telling your backend to provision the custom domain.

For now, DNS Helper only supports CNAMEs, but support for MX records (for mail providers) and TXT records (often used for domain ownership verification) are on the roadmap. The most exciting feature I have planned is OAuth support: if the DNS provider supports an API with OAuth, the user will be able to do an OAuth dance to have the correct record automatically added.

If you'd like to try DNS Helper out, here are some demos you can play around with: https://www.dnshelper.com/hn.html

Anyways, thanks for checking out DNS Helper! I'd love to hear all of your thoughts and I'm happy to answer any questions!