DNS / Zone configuration

After logging in you should see a screen called "Zone List". To add a new domain, click the "Add a zone" button at the bottom of the screen.

In the "add zone" screen you can set what IP address you want and any MX records/mail servers you want to associate with this domain and any prefixes(hosts) you wish to add to this zone for example "www" or "ftp". At first they will be all set to the same IP/MX servers but you can customize (or add) them later. For example you could have example.com and www.example.com point to two different servers.

To customize your Host configurations simply go to the host list (edit zone) and click on "edit host".

You can add aliases to zones in your profile. An alias will duplicate the configuration under a different name. Click on "Edit Alias List" to change the list of aliases attached to a zone.

Further Explanation

Zones

The zone is the main part of the url. For example in the name "www.example.com", the zone would be "example.com" (normally). DNS servers delegate 'authority' for a zone to our DNS servers, which then hand out information about the hosts in the zone.

Hosts

Hosts are the prefixes that go in front of your zone name. Some of the more common ones are "www , ftp, telnet, mail, irc". But you can use whatever Prefixes you want as long as they contain valid characters. You can even do things like domains.mydomain.example.com where domains.mydomain being the prefix. The DNS server uses these prefixes to determine where to direct the person going to that URL. Using the dynamic-DNS system you can quickly and easily set up multiple hosts and configure different IP addresses and Mail exchange servers for each host. Note: an empty prefix is a valid prefix.

e.g.: example.com can point to a different spot then www.example.com

IP address

The IP address field is where you set the IP address of the webserver you want the domain to point to. One of the advantages to the Domain-DNS system is you can change the location to wherever you want as often as you want. This can be handy if your website is hosted on a dynamic ip address.

Mail Exchangers(MX1/MX2)

Mail servers use DNS. When one is about to deliver a piece of e-mail, it looks at the address and queries the DNS system to determine to what server(s) to send the e-mail to. If MX records are set, the mail server will attempt to send the message to the host specified by MX1. If it can not deliver to that host, it will try to deliver it to MX2. If there is no MX record for the address, the message will be delivered to the IP associated with the address.

MX1 is the main mail exchange server. MX2 is the backup server. This server is usually located at another location in case there is a long-term problem the first server.

Zone Alias

An alias will function as a normal zone. It will contain the same hosts, MX records, IP addresses, etc. as the zone it is aliased to.

If you change the initial zone, the alias will change too.

The "zone" term

The "zone" described in the domain-dns system comes from a dns "zone file"... which is a more generic container for dns information than a domain name. Structured right, a zone file can be used for multiple domains (e.g. aliases in domain-dns.com), or it might only contain information for part of a domain (a subdomain).

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