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". Periods are allowed in prefixes.

IP address

The IP address field is where you set the IP address of the computer you want the domain to point to. One of the advantages of the Domain-DNS system is that you can update your settings (basically) as often as you want. This can be handy if your website is hosted on a dynamic ip address (also see Remote IP updates).

Mail Exchangers(MX1/MX2)

When a mail server starts to deliver an e-mail, it use DNS to determine to what server(s) to send the e-mail to. If MX records are set, the mail server will try to connect to the specified host to deliver the message. It will try each listed host (in the order specified) until one of the servers accepts the message.

If you need to specify more than two MX records, just add the extras with a comma. They are assigned increasing priorties, so the leftmost will be tried first, and all the hosts in in MX1 before any of the hosts in MX2.

TXT / SPF records

In the edit Host screen there is a TXT/SPF field. Putting in a value like "v=spf1 mx a:example.com ~all", will publish a valid SPF record for that host name. If you need multiple records, just put them both in and separate them with a comma.

Zone Alias

On the Zone List page, there is a setting for "Aliases". Aliases are alternate names (domain names) for the given zone. They will behave identically to the main zone. All the aliases will contain the same hosts, MX records, IP addresses, etc. as the main zone, and changes to the main zone will affect the aliases too.

The "zone" term

The "zone" described in the domain-dns system comes from a dns "zone file"... which is a more generic term 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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