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VOOZH | about |
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VOOZH | about |
DNS, or the Domain Name System, is often a very difficult part of learning how to configure websites and servers. Understanding how DNS works will help you diagnose problems with configuring access to your websites and will allow you to broaden your understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes.
In this guide, we will discuss some fundamental DNS concepts that will help you hit the ground running with your DNS configuration. After tackling this guide, you should be ready to set up your domain name with DigitalOcean or set up your very own DNS server.
Before we jump into setting up your own servers to resolve your domain or setting up our domains in the control panel, let’s go over some basic concepts about how all of this actually works.
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DNS, or the domain name system, is an essential component of modern internet communication. It allows us to reference computers by names instead of IP addresses. In this series, we will cover the basic ideas behind DNS so that you feel comfortable working with it. Afterwards, we will walk through various ways that you can gain greater control over your domains and DNS resolution.
Former Senior Technical Writer at DigitalOcean, specializing in DevOps topics across multiple Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04, 22.04, as well as Debian 10 and 11.
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Technically, 111.222.333.444 isn’t a valid IPv4 address since each grouping of numbers is 8 bits. Each has a range of 0-255.
Great article!
Just a minor fix, trailing dot is missing in the CNAME RDATA of MX & NS Records examples, e.g.
IN MX 10 mail1.domain.com.
IN NS ns1.domain.com.
Thank you both for the feedback. You are both correct, and I’ve updated the article accordingly. Thanks!
Without question the best DNS available. Currently, the pricing has changed actually to make it more accessible. You can get a domain on the full a anycast DynECT light platform starting at five dollars a month you are
I am impressed with the unicast DNS system you have set up. However honestly there are better options than this. Of course, it depends on what you want to spend and what type of uptime guarantee you need.
If you are hosting a large group of clients managed DNS by third-party is the way to go 9/10 times including adding a second managed DNS server to complete the redundancy. DynECT is the world’s best DNS if you ask me. I mix it EdgeCast route DNS both are able to resolve GEO-IP and make a blazing fast extremely redundant setup.
Other very fast options are to use DNS made easy if you need to secure it run AWS route 53 as the secondary DNS.
To give you an idea DNS made easy is considered one of the fastest DNS service in the world up there with DynECT, edge cast & ultraDNS.
If you have a lot of clients spend USD25 a year on 10 domains and 30 million queries per month if you need a larger amount USD50 a year gets you 25 domains 50 million queries per month with failover.
AWS route 53 is unbelievably capable for its price. USD.50 a domain a dollar per 10 million queries. (It is fast and reliable but not as fast and reliable as DNS made easy) Last but not least Akamai’s DNS is sold through Zerego at USD25 a month for 25 domains. DynECT light has dropped dramatically in price getting you a single domain with just under 1 million queries per second at roughly USD10 a month.
DNS is tracked continuously by SolveDNS you can type a name server into the top right search box and it will give you the stats on it and you can also look at all any cast managed DNS hosting companies speeds.
Last but not least remember to lower your TTL (time to live) the more queries you will use for the same amount of traffic. I know people that set their TTL for 60 min. (that is a good time by the way enough to cache and enough to change quickly) and a site with 20,000 unique visitors will be able to deal with under 1 million queries per month.
I should tell you that DynECT enterprise or just what they call DynECT DNS is about USD200 a month with 1 million queries a month you can lower the price and discuss the queries which are much less than you would think because it is an enterprise plan. When all is said and done if you want the ability to route CDN’s through Geo-IP you are looking at somewhere between $1,000 or $2,000 month.
With UltraDNS you can purchase their SMB offering for USD30 a month with 2 million queries and 50 domains.
For enterprise UltraDNS the price begins at USD1500 a month. Edge Cast route is not as sophisticated as DynECT or UltraDNS however it offers Geo-IP routing, fail over and load balancing for under USD100 a month.
The fastest are DynECT & edge cast followed by DNS made easy they are all in the under 10 ms club which is something that cannot be said for very many DNS hosts. No matter what you do to this system you can get something much faster for USD25 a year
Go to solveDNS.com to see statistics and run speed tests on any name server you want. Remember CloudFlare offers anycast DNS for free however it has terrible uptime and is not very fast most of the time because the entire anycast network absorbs all the attacks. Your better off using a system described above and having no issues with your DNS. the reason it is fast and the site I have referenced is because they test for only 2 to 3 min. a month not of the other services use their pops as a punching bag for free Subscribers and paid subscribers wanting the DDOS protection.
PS if you want to have a remarkably powerful firewall for very little money cloudproxy.sucuri.net is an amazing WAF and makes an excellent match with digital ocean.
Simple and Clear, easy to understand, Great article! Thank you Justin!
I think you may have meant “Pedantic” instead of “Semantic” above? Great article!
Hello! Thank you for the article, but as I see you may have a problem with FB sharing: http://tinypic.com/r/ilb0qw/8 Sorry for language) Translation of the pic’s text: “The specified URL-address configuration is not allowed Applications: One or more of the URL-address is blocked application settings. The address must match the address of the website or canvas, or domain should be a subdomain of a domain application.”
Hi. Great article! In the Zone File explanation, shouldn’t it be “…about the domains they have authority over” or “… are authoritative” instead of “…about the domains they know about” ?
Hi, in the process off learning all this from scratch i wrote a tutorial for setting up multiple Wordpress sites which people may find helpful, some things are missing from the digital ocean tutorials which are included here.
Setting-up-3-wordpress-sites-on-Apache-server-and-Ubuntu-14-04
… The resolving name server then checks its cache for the answer. If it doesn’t find it, it goes through the steps outlined above.
If it is configured to handle recursive queries, like a resolving name server, it will find out the answer and return it. Otherwise, it will tell the requesting party where to look next. (the ‘it’ is a bit unclear in this statement, I thought)
The statements are both technically accurate, I guess, but I was left with the impression that ‘the steps outlined above’ formed the recursive query - even though it didn’t feel at all recursive to me. Perhaps this can be further clarified, the recursive vs the iterative.
I found this article helped clear things up for me: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc961401.aspx
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