About Nameservers

[innovative2001]

A NAMESERVER is the program that actually does the work of looking up names. The program IN.NAMED acts as the name server. There is usually one name server for a cluster of machines.

There are three main types of NAMESERVERS:

1) CACHING-ONLY name server does lookups of names, but controls no name records itself.
2) PRIMARY name server not only does lookups of names, but also owns the records for a domain.
3) SECONDARY name server does name lookups and it also backs up a primary name server by providing authoritative answers for a certain domain. Many name servers will combine Primary and Secondary functionality for different domains.

[adi008]

nice topic man!!!..... :)

[cbdarts]

Interesting facts. Very helpful for people who dont know much about how DNS works.

I would also recommend something that explains how a DNS lookup works in detail, so people know what happens when they put 'yourname.com' in the address bar and hit enter.

Regards,
Chaitanya

[craigman]

Any ideas on how to keep a site online 24/7 if your first hosting/nameservers goes down?

[ASP-Hosting.ca]

Any ideas on how to keep a site online 24/7 if your first hosting/nameservers goes down?

You can have more than 2 nameservers for your domains. It's a good idea that these servers are on different physical servers, this way if there is a problem with one of them the rest will do the job.