DNS. It’s not exciting or particularly interesting for most businesses. Yet you all use the DNS every single day when you browse the internet, send emails or use apps on your mobile phone or tablet. DNS is the internet’s address book system and when it’s working you shouldn’t care about it, but if there’s a problem everything will stop working.The DNS is like the glue that connects the domain name to the various services that you use with it.
When you buy a domain name it won’t be “usable” until you attach services to it eg. email, hosting or a sitebuilder. In order for a domain name to work ie. be reachable, it needs a couple of things:
- to be registered (doh!)
- to have nameservers (like being included in an address book)
- for the nameservers to have correct records about where the various services associated with the domain reside
Companies such as ourselves provide nameservers to our clients when they register domain names with us, so they can use our “address book” service.
Several months ago we announced the addition of two new nameservers. So now domains registered through us and using our DNS will end up with 4 nameservers, 2 of which are dual stacked ANYCAST, as previously announced.
There seems to be a little bit of confusion around the DNS servers, so I thought a brief explanation might help.
When you register or transfer a domain to us we set two nameservers:
ns1.blacknight.com
ns2.blacknight.com
Shortly after those records are published our system sends the DNS records to the other two DNS servers outside our network and we automatically add them to the domain:
ns3.blacknight.com
ns4.blacknight.com
In order for DNS records to work properly all 4 nameservers need to be synced properly and “know” about each other’s existence, so please don’t try adding the extra nameservers yourself!
So if you register a domain with us and you see only two nameservers set on it, just wait a couple of hours. The other nameservers will get added automatically by the system.
NB: You will only be able to use the more resilient DNS if your domain(s) are registered through us. If your domains are with one of our competitors we can still host them for you, but only with the standard pair of nameservers. (So if you want better DNS you need to move your domains to us!)
Any questions? Just let us know.
About the Author: Michele Neylon
