Alright I have to admit I'm confused with how DNS works. I've always just added things until they worked, and now it's time to learn how they work.

So one confusing thing to me is that there's sort of two places I can have records. I have an account with rackspace cloud servers. And then there's the place I registered the domain. But both allow me to edit DNS records.

Should I do everything at both places or is one better than the other or am I missing the point?

Subdomains confuse me too. I'd like to be able to just have a wildcard subdomain (I've done this in the past.) I just don't like the idea of adding a cname record or A record every time I need a new subdomain.

Then I read this and it says:

The exact rules for when a wild card will match are specified in RFC 1034, but the rules are neither intuitive nor clearly specified. This has resulted in incompatible implementations and unexpected results when they are used.