Switch to ZoneEdit DNS

Hi all, I’m new to VPS. I recently got my personal site up and running. I only have 1 IP with my VPS account. Somehow I manged to wade through the DNS and get everything to work ok :slight_smile: I have the domain name with GoDaddy and setup 2 nameservers pointing to my IP (ns1.mydomain.com, ns2mydomain.com but they both point to single IP). Since I only have 1 IP I read it’s not the best way to fly on nameservers.

I was considering switching DNS over to an outsourced (free) DNS service like ZoneEdit. I’d change to point my domain to use their 2 nameservers they supply at zoneedit.com. My concern is what to do with all the DNS stuff I’ve setup in Virtualmin? When I switch over do I just turn off the DNS “feature” in the virtual server area in Virtualmin and that’s it or is there more to clean-up?

Thanks for any guidance,
-Mike

Hi Mike,

There are those who might disagree with me, but my personally opinion is that in your situation, I’d keep things as they are :slight_smile:

I think there’s a lot of advantages to having DNS hosted on your Virtualmin Server… and since it’s already setup that way, you’ve done all the hard work.

It’s not uncommon these days to have ones nameservers limited to one server.

Is that the most reliable setup you can offer? No, probably not.

But, if your VPS goes down, folks can’t get to your site anyways, whether the DNS lookup works at that point doesn’t matter so much.

The biggest benefit of moving your DNS elsewhere is that should your VPS go down, it’s possible that could cause any emails sent during that time to be queued on the sending server rather than bounced.

But, I’m not entirely certain what happens in that case, some systems may queue your email even when DNS is down (but some won’t).

Just some thoughts :slight_smile:

if you did indeed want to move elsewhere, then yes, you’d just disable the DNS feature in each of the Virtual Servers, followed by disabling the DNS option in “Feature and Plugins”.

-Eric

Thanks Eric, a lot to think about for a newbie :slight_smile: Good to hear on the 1 IP nameserver. This is just my personal website (blog and some other small apps) so it’s not mission critical.

Your line of thinking on mail being down was what got me thinking in first place. Another fact I forgot to mention is currently have all my mail routed through “Google Apps” - docs, mail etc. all branded to my personal domain so my MX & CNAME recs just point to their servers. If the VPS does go down mail will still flow if I use a 3rd party DNS.

My VPS is also a fairly new provider so reliability isn’t fully known yet so the whole email flow was the angle I was what I trying to protect from the unknown.

-Mike