I'm missing something obvious

I'm going to start over again. I bought a 'domain name' from dollarhost.com and then after the money transfer I realized all they were going to do was redirect qartis.com to a different address, and give me 20 @qartis.com email addresses. I'm thinking of switching my domain to domainpeople.com as they're local (Vancouver, Canada) and they offer free DNS zone record changes (dollarhost doesn't). I can get a linux server running on it's own IP address (we'll say 98.76.54.321) but I'm afraid of having the same thing happen over again ('domain name' => url redirect). I'd like to know how you guys are running devshed.com (as in, who you've payed, for what, what software you need to run, etc). I've learned that I need to run a DNS server, but still don't know much about that.

I guess it doesn't have to be devshed.com that you explain, but it's working perfectly (@devshed.com email addresses, subdomains, etc) so if your domain name is working fine, please share your setup!

Off topic, you should have posted this to WebHosting forum.

>> how you guys are running devshed.com

Don't ask them, Devshed don't run DNS servers, they only host their domain at infowest.com, therefore the person running Devshed don't even have a clue about DNS. And not to mention when infowest.com misconfigured their DNS as well.

As far as transfering out of dollarhost.com, you should do so immediately. What I am going to do in few minutes later is to report dollarhost.com to http://www.rfc-ignorant.org/ because dolloarhost people don't follow RFC standard.