DNS - runing your own ?

[dee]

Hi all,

I currently have about 400 co.uk / uk domains, and find lack of controllable DNS a pain as obviously cant do anything other than point to nameservers in nominet control panel. I'm using domain manage for sales, and thats great...also allows me to forward a domain in needed, but you cant set up any subdomains for example.

If i wanted to set up my own nameservers and say just point domains to ns1.mydomain.co.uk and ns2.mydomain.co.uk, and be in control of my own forwarding and subdomains etc, is it easy to deal with, and how expensive ? What are the off the shelf options please ?

Hope that makes sense

 

[Ryan Ewen]

Nominet -> Cloudflare. Custom name servers are £20 per month although you don't really need them for 400 domains i would just use cloudflare free.

 

[dee]

Nominet -> Cloudflare. Custom name servers are £20 per month although you don't really need them for 400 domains i would just use cloudflare free.

Thank you. I'll check it out !

 

[webber]

Using Cloudflare DNS is the easiest and you get to hide your hosting server ip from any DDoS or malefic poking. And it's free.
Setting up your own DNS server is relatively easy with BIND and a $5 vps on DigitalOcean would be more than plenty, but you need to be comfortable with SSH and Linux.
I've set up mine (webber.forsale) to have a wildcard result so that if a domain is not configured it will display the default for-sale page. This saves me a lot of time with new domains.

 

[dee]

Using Cloudflare DNS is the easiest and you get to hide your hosting server ip from any DDoS or malefic poking. And it's free.
Setting up your own DNS server is relatively easy with BIND and a $5 vps on DigitalOcean would be more than plenty, but you need to be comfortable with SSH and Linux.
I've set up mine (webber.forsale) to have a wildcard result so that if a domain is not configured it will display the default for-sale page. This saves me a lot of time with new domains.

Yeah... Im currently playing with cloudflare. Seems straight forward other than wildcard not working at mo... user error im sure. Vanity nameservers would have been good but not be all and end all.

Your setup seems ideal, but ssh etc out of my comfortzone really. I'd need a control panel

 

[Ryan Ewen]

Hi Ryan, I always thought vanity NS on Cloudflare was only with their business/enterprise plans ($200/mo+), is there another way to configure them on a cheaper plan that you know of?

Cheers,
Greg

Yes you might be correct - i am exploring an enterprise plan but they said i could have the nameservers for $20pm plan as they wanted to pilot what we are working on.

 

[Ryan Ewen]

Using Cloudflare DNS is the easiest and you get to hide your hosting server ip from any DDoS or malefic poking. And it's free.
Setting up your own DNS server is relatively easy with BIND and a $5 vps on DigitalOcean would be more than plenty, but you need to be comfortable with SSH and Linux.
I've set up mine (webber.forsale) to have a wildcard result so that if a domain is not configured it will display the default for-sale page. This saves me a lot of time with new domains.

Is this as reliable as other proividers like Cloudflare - speed to update and distribute records etc? Does it all run off 1 bind server or do you need multiple in different locations?

 

[Paullas]

Just signed up for cloudflare. Honest opinions is this what people reccomed instead of using server nameservers direct?

 

[webber]

If all you want is vanity nameservers then you can simply create glue records using your hosting provider's nameserver ip addresses.
That is if they have static ip address for their nameservers. CF are dynamic.
Alternatively, and definitely on the bodge side, you can make your ns1.yourdomain.uk a CNAME of your hosting provider's nameserver, including the free whatever.ns.cloudflare.com

 

[dee]

If all you want is vanity nameservers then you can simply create glue records using your hosting provider's nameserver ip addresses.
That is if they have static ip address for their nameservers. CF are dynamic.
Alternatively, and definitely on the bodge side, you can make your ns1.yourdomain.uk a CNAME of your hosting provider's nameserver, including the free whatever.ns.cloudflare.com

dont know what glue records are.... starts googling

 

[Paullas]

Ask ChatGPT

 

[dee]

Ask ChatGPT

actually... good idea!

 

[Ryan Ewen]

Just signed up for cloudflare. Honest opinions is this what people reccomed instead of using server nameservers direct?

Yes - its a great solution

 

[Ryan Ewen]

If all you want is vanity nameservers then you can simply create glue records using your hosting provider's nameserver ip addresses.
That is if they have static ip address for their nameservers. CF are dynamic.
Alternatively, and definitely on the bodge side, you can make your ns1.yourdomain.uk a CNAME of your hosting provider's nameserver, including the free whatever.ns.cloudflare.com

I am running Plesk - and have fixed IP's which are crazy expensive. Would it provide a good solution if i ran custom nameservers there?

 

[webber]

Fixed IPs shouldn't be expensive, maybe $1-2/month each.
Vanity nameservers are just for that – vanity.
My setup only uses one nameserver which is not great, but keeps things simple for me. This is only serving for-sale landing pages for parked domains so if there is an outage it won't be the end of the world. For hosting a high traffic website i would not recommend this.
The best solution by far is to use the nameservers of a trusted provider. They will have redundancy, active monitoring and 24h support.
When reliability is important it's best to leave it to the professionals.

 

[Ryan Ewen]

Fixed IPs shouldn't be expensive, maybe $1-2/month each.
Vanity nameservers are just for that – vanity.
My setup only uses one nameserver which is not great, but keeps things simple for me. This is only serving for-sale landing pages for parked domains so if there is an outage it won't be the end of the world. For hosting a high traffic website i would not recommend this.
The best solution by far is to use the nameservers of a trusted provider. They will have redundancy, active monitoring and 24h support.
When reliability is important it's best to leave it to the professionals.

Perfect - thats what i thought.

We have 256 IP's so it is expensive. Previously it was £1 per IP for 23 years. Now it is £2 per IP per month

 

[webber]

Even Nominet uses CloudFlare:
https://rdap.uk/?type=domain&object=nominet.com

 

[dee]

Even Nominet uses CloudFlare:
https://rdap.uk/?type=domain&object=nominet.com

all seems straightforward. Do you mind me asking:

So i'm pointing a domain at their nameservers. Then in that domain im just setting up a rule to forward to the lander. Is that all i need to do ? I mean... its working... but am i missing anything ?

 

[webber]

If it works, it works.
One thing to be aware of is that if you're using the page rule/redirect in CF then that could be cancelled in some cases by an A or CNAME record in the DNS settings. I say it could, or it should normally, unless CF has some special implementation (I haven't tried it)

Some useful tools to check various DNS settings:
https://mxtoolbox.com/DnsLookup.aspx
https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/dig/

 

[Ryan Ewen]

all seems straightforward. Do you mind me asking:

So i'm pointing a domain at their nameservers. Then in that domain im just setting up a rule to forward to the lander. Is that all i need to do ? I mean... its working... but am i missing anything ?

Thats all you have to do.

We typically have an A record and a CNAME for www but you can use rules also