[Web Hosting] Where do your DNS Records live? Registrar or Other?

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Landmine

Limp Gawd
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Oct 19, 2011
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I'm just wondering how most people who have their own dedicated servers manage their domain records. Registrar or your own name server? Currently I'm using my own name server, but feel I have more power and flexibility with my registrar.

Forgive me for not being clear, this is a question about web hosting servers. (A, MX, CNAME records and the like)
 
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I run split DNS. Internal is on Microsoft DNS (domain setup at home). External is with GoDaddy.

If you aren't running internal to target internal resources then there really is no need to run your own DNS server. You could use an external DNS to list internal resources however people will scream "Security risk" all day long (Nevermind, nobody cares about the internal IP address of your 10TB personal file server which holds little to no valuable financial data to a REAL hacker).
 
I have my server at home on a dedicated IP and just use Namecheap for the DNS records. Internal clients use BIND running on my EdgeRouter Lite with NAT Hairpin.
 
I run my own name server, and use twisted4life as secondary (is free for up to 10 domains; I don't remember how I found them, but they're pretty good for free!). If your server IP isn't really a static IP, it can be a pain to manage updating your nameserver IP though.
 
Is it safer/better to put all of your DNS records with the registrar or keep them on your server?
 
I use Godaddy's DNS servers. I think they had an outage earlier this year (DDoS or something). I didn't notice it, but then again, it was my personal domains and I don't check them more than a couple times a day. I used to run my own DNS servers, but my server crashed, and couldn't get replacement up in time, so I moved DNS services to Godaddy. The lowest TTL they will do is 30 minutes on the free account (not sure if it goes lower on paid DNS services), FYI.

As for safety, it depends on if you think you can secure your DNS servers better than Godaddy, or think someone might gain access to your Godaddy account info somehow and make DNS changes.
 
I run my own DNS, more flexible and I don't have to rely on a 3rd party or have any kind of limitations. I use named.
 
DNS is such a commodity that you're a fool for running your own DNS if it isn't meant for internal services.
 
I feel a registrar like Namecheap can do a better and cheaper job securing their DNS servers than I can. I have yet to have any issues, TTL can be set to as low as 3 mins I believe and their Dynamic DNS works great. All for free with a domain from them. Highly recommend them.
 
I do a combination of both. I have some domain names where Namecheap is doing the DNS hosting, some where my ISP is doing the DNS hosting. So for me it varies.
 
I run my own DNS for a few of my domains, and use Dyn for (http://www.dyn.com/dns/) for Important or public facing stuff.

EDIT - to be clear, all the domains that I have on GoDaddy are set up on Dyn or my own servers. Dyn and GoDaddy are my registrars.
I suggest against trusting GoDaddy for anything other than domain registration.
 
For those who use 3rd party services, how do you do backups? One of the things I like about hosting it myself is that it's just simpler to manage and backup.

If I'm adding a new virtualhost entry for a new domain or subdomain, I'm already SSHed into the box, so I just do the domain stuff too while I'm there, reload named, httpd and I'm up and running with a new website or subdomain or w/e. Everything I did gets backed up that night as part of the normal routine.
 
You can have your zones locally and the auth servers externally.

Keyword "hidden primary"

I prefer to run my own servers so I have query logs.
 
Red Squirrel said:
For those who use 3rd party services, how do you do backups? One of the things I like about hosting it myself is that it's just simpler to manage and backup.

If I'm adding a new virtualhost entry for a new domain or subdomain, I'm already SSHed into the box, so I just do the domain stuff too while I'm there, reload named, httpd and I'm up and running with a new website or subdomain or w/e. Everything I did gets backed up that night as part of the normal routine.
Click to expand...

Backups of .. what? Zone files?

dig -axfr domain.tld @ns1.whatever.dns (if they allow it) or just run a hidden master as TCM noted and back it up like a regular file.
 
TCM said:
You can have your zones locally and the auth servers externally.

Keyword "hidden primary"

I prefer to run my own servers so I have query logs.
Click to expand...

Query logs are rather interesting to read. I've seen quite a few spoofed recursive DDoS attempts on my auth nameservers (but they don't answer obviously)
 
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