What is Secondary DNS?

If you have a Premium DNS account at GoWebsite, you can enable Secondary DNS, which backs up all of your DNS zone files to a secondary nameserver. If you enable Secondary DNS and your primary nameservers go down, your secondary nameservers receive and process requests so your domain won't ever go offline.

When setting up Secondary DNS, you select our nameservers as your primary (master) or secondary (slave) nameservers. If you make our nameservers the master set, all DNS zone file record updates will be made for you and the slaves (your nameserver set) will pick them up. If you make our nameservers the slaves, then your own master nameservers will make the DNS updates, and you must configure them to send notifications to our slave nameservers so they pick up the changes.

You can configure Secondary DNS with or without transaction signatures (TSIG), which secure communications between the nameserver sets.

Regardless of whether you make our nameservers the slaves or masters, you must use DNS server software to configure your own nameserver set. We are compatible with the following software:

• BIND v9.1.0 or later
• NSD
• Windows Server 2008 and later

Using Secondary DNS requires in-depth understanding of setting up and using your own nameservers. Your own nameserver set must support AXFR (full zone transfer) and NOTIFY (zone change notification) requests to transfer zone files between the DNS servers.

You cannot use both DNSSEC and Secondary DNS with the same domain name.

Next step

• Learn how to manage Secondary DNS