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DNS Manageability
Having control of your External DNS is often extremely valuable and important. There are a lot of companies out there who don’t really care about managing their dns because they hardly ever need to make a change or update a record. However, the majority need control of their DNS on a daily basis. Whether you decide to run your own DNS servers or outsource this to a third party, you should consider the following…
Items to Consider for DNS Management
- If you outsource your DNS, does your provider give you control? Does your hosting company, registrar, or DNS provider, have an interface for you to make necessary changes on the fly?
- What record types are supported by your provider? Are there any specific records that you know you need supported? Check to see what records your business needs and if you or your provider supports these.
- Propagation times? Its important to know how long a change will take to update should you need to make one. If you’re making a lot of changes every day, this is a huge factor for you. If you choose to let your hosting company or registrar handle your DNS, then they may not even give you control over this. Often times you’ll have to submit a support ticket requesting the specific change you need made. This is unacceptable for a lot of people as this could take hours if not days. What if one of your servers crashes and you need to update the new IP address manually?
- Secondary DNS – You may be the type of person who needs to have the management of the hardware on site. This is fine and you can still use a managed DNS provider as your external DNS solution. Check to see whether the DNS provider provides an API and if so, you’ll have two options. You can have your primary server talk to their network, so they can pull updates from your servers. This still gives you complete control over your own primary server for making all necessary changes, and then you can push these changes to your providers network. You can list just your DNS provider’s name servers at the TLD level, meaning, you will only assign their name servers as the authoritative servers. Or you can list both your authoritative servers with your providers, and you’ll both be sharing the traffic.
