[fredophile]

I don't have anything more important than a small personal website but now I'm curious. If you set up a system to handle your main DNS provider failing, how do you test it? Is there a good reference where I can find some best practices on this?

[mrideout]

Here's my testing recommendation:

1. Pick some subset of your DNS records to monitor, or all of them if you want to be extra thorough. If you are picking a subset, then I'd pick whatever records are most critical to your business.

2. Setup monitoring that queries each of your authoritative name servers for each of the records that you identified in the previous step. The monitoring should notify you if any of the name servers are unresponsive, or return a different response than what's expected.

If you'd like to dig into the details of DNS, then O'Reilly's "DNS and BIND" is highly recommended, even if you're not using BIND.

There are a number of quality hosting providers out there. A rule of thumb that I use is this: If a DNS hosting provider doesn't eat their own dog food, don't trust them to handle your DNS. Digital Ocean doesn't use their own name servers for their main website's domain. Neither does Amazon.

Shameless plug: I created a DNS monitoring service that can be used used for monitoring each of your name servers: https://www.dnscheck.co/

[tonyarkles]

The flipside to the dog food point: if DigitalOcean did use their own nameservers for their main site, then we wouldn't have been able to see the status page.

[mrideout]

Good point!