Setting up a Secondary DNS is crucial in preparing your business and digital platforms against possible attacks and disruptions. It is a data backup system that can help improve DNS resolution performance, reduce latency, improve scalability, and more. This post will discuss what it is, how it works, and provide tips to help with your configuration. Let’s get started!
Purpose of Secondary DNS
Secondary DNS is a system for hosting DNS (Domain Name System) records. It is a backup system for DNS records if the primary server goes out of service. This ensures that incoming requests made to the domain name can still be resolved and that the name can still point to the correct website. It not only provides a failover plan for downtimes but also helps reduce DNS lookup latency and provides better website availability.
This service also provides an additional layer of security for DNS. When utilized with an active-active setup, both servers have to have the same DNS records, adding a layer of safety against malicious attacks, as any changes to DNS must be reflected on both servers to take effect. Moreover, it helps improve performance and scalability since it can distribute the traffic load among multiple DNS servers. This helps to lessen the load on a single DNS server and speeds up load times.
How does it function?
Secondary DNS works by replicating zone files and DNS zones from the primary DNS server and hosting it on a second DNS server. Once set up, the Secondary DNS server will use a DNS transfer protocol such as Traffic Zone Transfer (AXFR) to update records from the primary DNS server. This ensures that all changes made on the primary DNS server will be replicated on the secondary server. Apart from this, these servers can be configured with load balancing, which helps to distribute the load among multiple servers and improves the performance of the DNS resolution. This service also provides a failover plan in case the primary server goes down, as it takes over the role of the primary server in such an event.
For whom is Secondary DNS best?
Many can take advantage of Secondary DNS from businesses to websites and other digital platforms. Companies, significantly larger enterprises or those relying heavily on their online presence, can take advantage of this service as part of their disaster recovery and data backup plan. Website owners can also leverage Secondary DNS to improve the performance of their websites by reducing DNS lookup latency and providing better availability. Lastly, other digital platforms like gaming networks, streaming services, and databases can use Secondary DNS to ensure that their services run without disruption. All these can benefit from the failover setup, load-balancing, and improved performance that this service offers.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Secondary DNS can significantly improve your business’s performance and security. While configuring is more complicated than regular DNS servers, it is well worth the effort. It allows you to host reliable, secure, and fast DNS records, provides better availability for your website and applications, and even provides a failover system to help restore your system in case there are any downtimes. For these reasons, companies and website owners should set it up and take full advantage of its benefits.