hello everyone:

i plea ignorance when it comes to the technical aspect of web hosting, but when you have a dedicated server with the dns server installed on that server as ns1.mydomain.com and ns2.mydomain.com. what exactly are these dns server? are they real dns server or just alias to a dns server somehere else?

a reseller promise to setup dns on my dedicated server. if i was to update or add a A record (or mx record) onto that DNS server (ns1.mydomain.com), will it replicate throughout the internet?

any response will be greatly appreciated.

If you are running the DNS service/daemon on your machine then you are running a real DNS server. ;)

ns1 and ns2 are simply the resource records that identify the names and IPs of your DNS servers.

When you have DNS configured on your server, and someone's domain name is configured to use your name servers, then everyone on the Internet will look to your DNS servers to resolve the name to an IP.

When you change/update/modify a DNS entry, that takes time to replicate throughout the Internet because often the old info is cached locally to the person doing the lookup.