My VPS or Domain Host DNS?

[Chris_W]

Steep learning curve

I have just purchased a vps service to host two php/mysql driven sites.
I have it all up and running using my domain hosts dns to point to my domains. Is this the best way, or is it better to set custom servers at my domain host and use the vps dns, and why?

Chris_W

 

[fm7]

You need more than a server and more than an AS to run properly a DNS for your domain. Just one VPS is not enough. If your current DNS provider follows the RFCs probably you don't need to move to other free or paid service. Anyway be sure you can modify the list of authoritative nameservers of your domain(s) at your discretion, any time, no strings attached.

 

[Chris_W]

At the moment the the VPS has the main domain as cursorium.co.uk and has ns1.cursorium.co.uk and ns2.cursorium.co,uk set in WHM. I have found that I need to use the DNS of my domain host/registrar to point to the main domain and to set host records for the main domain, but any addon domains work okay using ns1.cursorium.co.uk and ns2.cursorium.co,uk

 

[fm7]

if ns1.cursorium.co.uk and ns2.cursorium.co.uk point to the same machine you are ignoring RFCs. One consequence is FQDN queries may fail to resolve because your server may appear down while it is up. How is that possible? The DNS queries usually are done by intermediate cache nameservers. Performing the query the cache-ns may try several auth-ns. But if there is just one route and the connection fails ... Some users think "if my VPS is down doesn't matter the nameserver is down because Web/Mailserver/... services are down as well" but they fail to understand that user's route to the server can be different of the cache-ns' route, specially when the intermediate is not in the same AS, and sometimes not even in the same country, as Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8), OpenNIC, and zillion others [1] [2].

Using your registrar infrastructure to host cursorium.co.uk dns records you have redundancy, resiliency, and likely geographic and network diversity.