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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?

7 Answers 7

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

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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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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, 2011 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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  • You can edit TTL with PointHQ now. What you cannot do with their free version is add any non-PointHQ nameservers
    – Cocowalla
    Mar 12, 2013 at 11:37
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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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If you have an available machine, you could set up your own name server pretty easily (with bind for instance), would probably take all of 10 mins to do so. Would be surprised if your domain name registrar did not have multiple name servers to choose from though, would probably be your safest/easiest bet to go with that instead.

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