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Our domain is hosted at Heroku, the registrar is Godaddy, the DNS is hosted at Godaddy.

The web services portion of our app had significant outages today+yesterday due to issues with Amazon AWS accessing DNS at Godaddy, eg, Godaddy DNS has been flaky, so Amazon-based services were seeing lots of errors when trying to resolve our domain name.

We'd like that NOT to happen again, so I'm trying to find out what (if any) secondary DNS services are compatible with having Godaddy as the primary DNS.

I have not found ANY of the other dns providers who state they can work as backup for DNS at Godaddy.

Any pointers on implementing a backup for DNS would be appreciated!

(It SEEMS like you can only get secondary or backup DNS form the SAME company that does your primary? At least for Zerigo and dyndns and easydns I don't see a standalone backup DNS option... doesnt that defeat the purpose of having a backup if the same company whose primary broken s handling the secondary?)

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  • for anyone interested, here's a step-by-step article on how to use a secondary DNS for DNS backup wiht Godaddy as your primary DNS provider pardner.com/2011/10/…
    – jpw
    Oct 31, 2011 at 18:59
  • as to being closed as Off Topic, I didn't put it here anyway, someone on stackoverflow pushed it over here!
    – jpw
    Nov 22, 2011 at 17:26

3 Answers 3

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For primary, you need DNS hosting that would allow secondary name servers hosted by someone else. Technically this feature called "zone transfers", or AXFR/IXFR, and preferably (but not 100% necessary) is to have ability on PRIMARY provider to configure which SECONDARY servers you have, this way primary may send notifications to secondaries whenever you make a change to your zone. For an example of such package, look at this UltraDNS table, note "AXFR/IXFR" row.

As for secondary (=backup) servers you need DNS hosting that can act as secondary, this feature usually called just this way - "secondary DNS" or "Backup DNS".

GoDaddy does NOT supports zone transfers (as mentioned here), thus NO company could work as a secondary (=backup) for GoDaddy.

(I'm in no way affiliated with any companies I mentioned. :)

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    very helpful, although Godaddy premium DNS does support zone transfers, i got it working today with dnsunlimited thanks to your tips re AXFR. I do NOT however recommend Godaddy premium DNS... there's at least one report they intentionally degraded DNS perhaps in order to push more people into Premium DNS. See rscott.org/dns/GoDaddy_Selective_DNS_Blackouts.htm GD Premium DNS, for example, does NOT have Godaddy's usual "prorata" refund policy -- you must prepay for a year, then after 5 days, no refund. So I'll cancel in a day or two, just wanted a dry run to test it all out.
    – jpw
    Oct 31, 2011 at 5:27
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There is no reason that you can't do what you want manually. Have two DNS providers, and manually make sure they are the same. I don't expect that your DNS changes enough to make this a real problem. List the name servers from both providers on the DNS section of your domain registration.

It isn't a perfect solution .. if one of the servers goes down it will still get some of the requests. But it is better than everything being down.

Really though, a far better solution is to get to a first class DNS host. GoDaddy has burned you once .. why give them the chance to burn you again? ZoneEdit is good, as is UltraDNS.

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  • How about potential mismatch on SOA record fields, though? I don't know about GoDaddy in particular, but I doubt they let you manually specify that data. Oct 30, 2011 at 17:03
  • Each DNS host company is going to think it is the primary an put itself in the SOA; the other items come from the zone settings. The TTL and zone setup info need to match. I don't think it is a huge issue for a stable environment. As I noted; this is really a second choice solution anyway. Better to get to a DNS host that won't fail.
    – tomjedrz
    Oct 30, 2011 at 17:12
  • Yeah - mismatching serials is not so good. Definitely a second choice solution. Oct 30, 2011 at 17:15
  • It could confuse downstream/propagated DNS servers, but that really isn't a problem if the two DNS systems are kept otherwise identical.
    – tomjedrz
    Oct 30, 2011 at 17:20
  • I agree with the godaddy comment, although as noted in my other comment, it IS possible to get it working.
    – jpw
    Oct 31, 2011 at 5:29
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Godaddy being the primary host probably wouldn't allow that kind of integration. You're probably better off going with more reliable dns provider that will allow you to specify the backup dns other than themselves.

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