In fact, right now for our low cost webhosting (not our high end plans) we do DNS, mail, www, and ftp on the same servers as the accounts are on. That is, one server handles all services for that account. As you said, what is the point of domains resolving and such if the server itself is down and unavailable.
For our high-end plans and other dedicated hosting solutions, we spread out the DNS data across more servers... the point being to make DNS resolution more reliable. >after all, what use is it to me to be able to resolve > e.g. metrosophia.com to its IP, if the IP and the backup MX are down? Well, there is your weakest link. Make the server to which the IP points to failover to another server if it becomes unavailable. This has nothing to do with 2, 4, or 8 DNS servers in rotation. Your weakest link is that your IP point to a server and if the server dies, the IP becomes unavailable. Look at "heartbeat" and many others for IP-takeover and other solutions. Sincerely, Jason http://www.zentek-international.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "martin f krafft" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "debian isp" <debian-isp@lists.debian.org> Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2002 2:29 AM Subject: OT: secondary dns a general question: so i have this server handling some domains as primary DNS, as well as being their web- and mailserver. another domain does slaving and secondary MX, but because i don't want load-balancing on DNS RR basis for webservices, and because HTTP can't deal with secondary servers, webpages are stuck on that server only. i have some 17 DNS servers under my control, so i am always tempted to configure 4 DNS servers for each domain, that is, in addition to the two main servers described above, i usually add two other ones out of the pool of the remaining 15 to the WHOIS data and NS record of the zone data. however, this being an extra administrative burden, and me currently in the process of moving to another registrar, i started questioning the point of the additional two. assume the main server as well as it's mail backup (the second server) both go down, then what's the point of being able to resolve the zone data? i guess negative TTL, but is there another reason? after all, what use is it to me to be able to resolve e.g. metrosophia.com to its IP, if the IP and the backup MX are down? i'd appreciate any comments.