Win Web Hosting

is the DNS server running on the same machine as your domain server or is it a separate machine.

Five minutes with more or less point-n-click is “know how, time and development cost to get it right”? If you configure one DNS server at your registrar and one with your hoster (two different companies and two different networks) how is that not “genuine redundancy”? My hoster has 5 different internet connections at two different locations. How is that not “genuine redundancy”? It’s all included in the price of the hosting services. This is neither expensive nor time consuming.

You setup 2 nameservers on the server simply because most domain registrars as well as dns standards out there require 2 nameservers setup. So, This is simply a “fast” and inexpensive way to provide the registrar with the 2 nameservers. Also, genuine redundancy is very costly either way you put it. Yes there are free solutions out there, but even those require know how, time and development cost to get it right. This method is a quick, poor-mans server setup and is quite common.

2) I didn’t mean to imply that ns1 will always be queried before ns2 (most resolver implementations will query ns1 first, but as you correctly pointed out, that’s not guaranteed). The point was to have redundancy (which is why the resolvers will also usually put out queries in pairs, just in case one query times out, as suggested by RFC 1034)

dns doesn’t work like the way you think it does. If you had ns1 on one server and ns2 on another, it would load whichever nameserver loads fastest. there is no rhyme or reason to which NS will load first or second. So, if you had enough money to afford 2 boxes + realtime sync software ($10000′s of $) then you can do what you’re proposing. Otherwise, registrars require you to register more than one ns so you need to setup 2 nameservers on the same server.

why not the ns2 ???