DNS Hosting Service — What Is It?

DNS Hosting Service — What Is It?

It’s time to elaborate on our service that we provide for free to our users of SSD VDS or dedicated servers from ITLDC. We are talking about the DNS hosting service, or in other words, the provision of a cluster of secondary NS servers.

As is known, at least two NS servers are required to host domain zones, which must have different IP addresses, preferably from different networks. Some users order an additional IPv4 address for this purpose, set it up as secondary (alias) on their server, and handle DNS requests locally, from one server or VDS.

Undoubtedly, this method has its merits - not only is it widely used, but it’s also effective. However, this option has one significant drawback - in case of server unavailability, all services related to DNS will fail, and users making queries during the downtime will “cache” what is known as a negative response (that the host is not found) for 10-15 minutes.

That is why it is recommended for DNS servers to be located in different network infrastructures and locations - in this case, all incoming queries will be handled correctly regardless of the main server’s availability. A pleasant side effect of this setup is also a higher response speed to DNS queries.

The system is arranged in such a way that on the user’s server or VDS there is a “primary” DNS, where the original master copies of the domain zones are stored, but user queries are not processed there. The task of the primary DNS is to allow our DNS cluster to obtain instances of the domain zones; this update occurs after each change to the master copies or every few days. After that, all queries are handled exclusively by our DNS servers - as quickly as possible.

We use four synchronized DNS servers located in different locations - in the Netherlands, the USA, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. The names of these servers are neutral - nsX.layer6.net, where X is a number from 1 to 4. The servers are located in various segments of the Internet and have excellent network availability characteristics, as required for the correct operation of DNS.

Ordering the service is very simple - in the self-service system’s services section, select the “DNS Hosting” option, then “Secondary NS (ns*.layer6.net)”. Please note that the service is free for those users who have other active services - at the final step of ordering, in this case, the cost will be €0.00. Within a few minutes, the DNS hosting will be activated, and you will receive an activation message with detailed instructions on how to configure your ISPManager panel. If the panel is not used, you will need to manually edit the configuration of the “primary” DNS server (allowing transfer and notify) and also manually specify in the service management interface the domain names that should be handled by our DNS cluster.

p.s. Have you read that we are giving out discounts and hope that you have already subscribed to updates on our Facebook page? Then here’s the next promo code - SERVER-NVZ0c. Enter it at checkout and receive a 10% discount on any standard configuration of dedicated servers!