Hi,

I have a recently set up a dedicated server and am hosting about 70 domain names on it. I am not offering shared hosting to the general public - so the domain name records are not going to change often - just if I need to actually move things around like split email serving off onto another server, etc.

Anyway, at the moment most of the domains have their DNS records hosted on register.com's name servers. I think that is working OK. The register.com site's user control panel is slow and clunky - it would certainly be easier to be editing the zone record files myself through webmin on my own server. But this is hardly a big worry for me - because, like I said, the domains DNS records are pretty much set and forget.

1) So my newbie question to you gurus is - should I even consider setting up bind9 and running named on my dedi server and hosting the dns records locally? What are the pros and cons I should consider?

2) Also - I don't really understand how name servers work - although I am quite comfortable with the idea of editing the zone record files. What I don't understand is how the secondary DNS hosting works. I have always just used my domain name registrar to handle DNS hosting. With the second, third, forth, etc nameserver - are the zone records sort of automatically mirrored and updated from the primary name server - or is it a matter of replicating things yourself?

3) How much will running a name server add to my bandwidth comsumption if I were to do so?

As much as I hate bringing up this debate, I would recommend using something OTHER than Bind. TinyDNS by Dan Bernstien is a good choice, and is the only name server I will use.

At any rate, I always run my own DNS for various reasons. The only disadvantage to running your name server on the same machine is that some registrars (mostly non-US domains) require the primary and secondary to be on different machines (and different subnets). You can of course still use a third party for your secondaries in this case.

Secondary name servers are simply another name server to query in the event the first one is down. Some people run both on the same machine, while others have them in completely different parts of the world. Generally only two are required, and most US registrars don't care if they are on the same machine or not, though they always recommend spllitting them off.

You won't see much of a bandwidth difference at all -- you may see an increase in memory usage (though very small if you use TinyDNS), but bandwidth will be negligable for the most part.

For secondaries, you might have a look at Granite Canyon (http://www.granitecanyon.com) who provides this service for free.

Hope this helps a little...

How would one go about setting an ns2.domain.com on the same machine as ns1.domain.com? I'm using WHM and CPanel and want to make sure the right way to do it before I try anything.