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I'm looking for a service to host my secondary nameserver. I've been looking at DynDns because of the great feedback I see on ServerFault & other sites.

But I'm looking at two of their plans: Custom DNS ($30/year) and Secondary DNS ($40/year). All I'm looking for is to have a secondary nameserver which points to the same place my primary one does.

Does Custom DNS do everything I need & work correctly, or do I need the extra $10/year for the Secondary DNS? Or is there another plan/provider that would better fit my purposes?

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6 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

Could you just use the DNS server of your domain name registrar? They usually support subdomains etc.

EDIT: In addition your hosting provider often supplies a DNS server as well (even if you rent a VPS or dedicated server).

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up vote 2 down vote

For secondary DNS services, I use afraid.org and buddyns.com; both free.

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up vote 1 down vote

Instead of looping it back to your primary DNS an alternate way of fulfilling your need is to get a additional IP on the primary DNS sever and advertise it as secondary DNS.

But I would suggest you use a free DNS instead. The whole idea of having redundant DNS is to increase availability.

http://freedns.afraid.org/

It will provide some risk mitigation.

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"Instead of looping it back to your primary DNS an alternate way of fulfilling your need is to get a additional IP on the primary DNS sever and advertise it as secondary DNS" - Thus completely defeating the purpose of having a secondary server ... – Zypher♦ Apr 26 '11 at 15:10
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A free and easy to use DNS hosting service is PointHQ. I have been using them to manage 4 domains over the past year and have been very impressed. Only drawback I've found is lack of ability to edit TTL.

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up vote 0 down vote

Three more free DNS providers that can be used as secondaries:

  1. Namecheap - http://www.namecheap.com/products/freedns.aspx
  2. Xname - http://www.xname.org/ (more than 25 domains is considered "abusive" without donation; see their conditions)
  3. ClouDNS - http://www.cloudns.net/ (max 6 domains free)

I've used PointHQ: they don't really support being a secondary in their free version. Namecheap I didn't manage to use. ClouDNS don't let you set SOA records in their free version.

So for this task I recommend Xname, which is painless if you are happy with BIND configuration.

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up vote 0 down vote

You need Secondary DNS (the upper option) for having DNS replication.

Notice that there are several equivalent DNS replication services for free. Here are some:

Some of them have paid options for support or high traffic.

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