Own DNS servers or use Jaguar

[jagged]

I'm in the process of setting up my main domain on a new VPS account and I've got another 6 I'd like to migrate over if all goes well. My question is should I attempt to set up my own DNS servers on the VPS or use Jaguars 'independant DNS network' as metioned in the welcome email? What are the pros and cons and does adding zones to Jaguars network cost anything? As you may have gathered I'm fairly new to VPS management

Regards,
Jagged

[rainboy]

Its simple,

If you have your own DNS and a control panel, dns is mostly automated, if you want to use Jags servers, it means you have to put a ticket in for every change, or new added domain.

Con's of having your own DNS server: they are running on the same machine, so if DNS fails on the box, nobody can access or resolve the domains anymore, and will show to the outside world as not active domains.

If you have your own servers and a backup DNS server elsewhere this would be the best sollution from my point of view.

Kindest regards,
Patrick

[jagged]

Hi,
I'm trying to pull all of my sites onto one server to make admin simpler so I guess using Jaguars servers would be the safest/easiest option? Also I have several sub-domains, would these need registering separately with Jaguar or will they work anyway if the main domain has been registered? Finally is this service included in the price I pay now or will I have to pay each time I add a domain or sub-domain?

Thanks again
Jagged

[the_ancient]

I am debating this myself

on the one hand having everything here and managed by jag would be very east and less stressful, however if I use a external DNS service/server I would have the abilty to change things if something happened here at jag, so if say the server crashed and would be down for awhile, I could redirect all sites to a Backup server or a "site is currently down for mantiance check back soon" message instead of vistors getting bubkiss.


but it would be a headache to maintain....

[jason]

In the standard configuration that JPC uses on shared accounts, all subdomains get their own A record in the DNS. If you set up your DNS this way (which is what probably 99.99% of all hosts do) each subdomain you add would have to be updated separately.

The way around this is to set up a DNS wildcard which redirects and unmatched subdomain to a given IP. Since the mapping of name to website is actually done by Apache and not the DNS, this works well. Unfortunately most Apache configurations allow any unmatched name to display the homepage (for example dfhdfkhsjkf.yourdomain.com would show the same thing as www.yourdomain.com). If the SE's pick up one of these non-standard names they could index that instead of the one you prefer. This can be prevented in your Apache config or with a mod_rewrite fix in .htaccess (which has been posted to these bords several times).

As far as cost, I don't believe that JPC charges for making DNS updates, but you'd have to ask sales [a] jaguarpc . com to be sure.

--Jason

[jagged]

Thanks for all the help. I'm setting up with Jags DNS servers for now; it turns out this service is included so I'll leave setting up my own DNS servers for now.

Regards,
Jagged