Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : DNS server

[ZKuJoe]

What are the pros and cons of having a central DNS server? Does the server have to be strictly dedicated to DNS?

Here is my current setup:
1 VPS running CentOS5 with cPanel/WHM
2 Dedicated servers running CentOS5 with cPanel/WHM

I was wondering if it would be beneficial to use cPanel's DNS clustering setting and using the VPS as the main DNS server (it is currently only used for host 4 websites, 1 being my main site that my clients access while their sites are hosted on the 2 dedicated servers). In doing so, would this make it possible to offer subdomains for 1 domain over the 2 dedicated server without having to manually setup the DNS for each new site?

What approach do you recommend?

[david510]

If dns server is on a different machine, the domain resolution will take place even if the server where webserver is running goes down due to load issues. If you are running a dns cluster on a separate server where no load consuming services are running, then your dns service will be more stable.

If you are using cPanel dns cluster you don't need to manually add each time in central server. When you make changes on the source server the change will reflect in the cluster.

[whrss]

As said above, DNS clustering will always increase redundancy.

But I am a bit confused over your second query. Can you make it a bit clearer?

Originally Posted by JWeb2

In doing so, would this make it possible to offer subdomains for 1 domain over the 2 dedicated server without having to manually setup the DNS for each new site?

What approach do you recommend?

[ZKuJoe]

I run a free web hosting company and I offer users a free subdomain off of the domain 2x.nu but plan on purchasing a server in the UK for overseas users but I still want to offer the 2x.nu subdomain for overseas customers. Is this possible with DNS clustering?

[mugo]

Unless your boxes are very busy, you can run DNS on them just fine. New clients get 1 query normally (then used cached info locally) so unless you have thousands of NEW clients hitting DNS all the time, no problem to host DNS also. You can do any of these, and have redundancy -

Run one of your boxes as "master", the other 2 as "slave", and register all 3 as SOA for your domain(s).
This way, if one box or more goes down, clients will still resolve. If all 3 are down, and all domain services are on these boxes, and those services are down anyway, then, it really won't matter too much if clients can resolve you.
Also, set each box to use itself first when querying, this speeds your servers forward resolution quite a bit.

Or, get a 3rd party DNS service. You can get this very very cheap. I use this on a large corps site, if fails over, finally landing on a "technical difficulties" holding page.
If all boxes are down, customers like a "sorry, we're on it" rather than "Host not found" any day.

[ZKuJoe]

I'm not to worried about redundancy, I'm more concerned about my ability to expand.