If you have waited with bated breath for your school or college results, you must have also noticed that the institution generally provides more than one link to view the results and this, of course, makes you less nervous! The simple reason being if one link doesn\u2019t work you can always use the other links.<\/p>\n
This facility of multiple providers is basically called Secondary DNS. But then what is DNS in the first place?<\/p>\n
Domain Name System or DNS (or servers) is basically an internet service that translates domain names into IP (Internet Protocol) address. As IP addresses are numerical they are complex to remember. However, domain names being alphabetical they\u2019re easy to remember. For example, www.example.com can translate to IP address 198.111.121.4<\/p>\n
Now that we have a fair sense of idea on what DNS is let\u2019s understand what Secondary DNS means.<\/p>\n
When an organisation uses multiple service providers to host their primary DNS information, it is called Secondary DNS. In our above example, when an institution uses multiple links to hosts results of an examination it is using secondary DNS to host its primary DNS information.<\/p>\n
In a nutshell, if you have 4 sets of nameservers answering queries, if one is down then the load is shared amongst the remaining three. Once the first nameserver is up and running, the load will once again be divided between the four of them.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Due to the availability of Secondary DNS the load on the primary DNS gets reduced and customers have a more seamless experience accessing the servers.<\/li>\n
\u2013 Secondary DNS always acts as the best firefighting mechanism when the primary DNS is down or out of order. The other servers can still work, although with an increased load on them. However, this is better than having a complete blackout of the entire server until the primary DNS is up and working.<\/li>\n
\u2013 This is a process when the server provides a different server on account of Secondary DNS every time a user accesses the server. This helps as a load-balancing act.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Secondary DNS can be used by websites that have a high inflow of traffic that might result in the primary DNS server going down like the ones that run discount sales, declare examination results, etc. Since they are dealing with customers it can mean a loss of both money and customers. Configuring secondary DNS is a safe option for such websites.<\/p>\n
Now that we\u2019ve seen the kind of websites that might need secondary DNS, let us see, where can one find secondary DNS when you\u2019ve hosted your website with us. Hosting services by ResellerClub don\u2019t require setting up secondary DNS explicitly, as it is pre-configured. What this means is:<\/strong><\/p>\n Consider, you have four nameservers, one of the nameservers will be configured as a primary name server whereas the other three name servers will be configured as Secondary for backup purposes. As seen from the advantages above, there is no difference between a primary and a secondary DNS as Round Robin algorithm is used to resolve the name server records of a domain.<\/p>\n Usually, the first nameserver listed is primary followed by secondary. However, there is no set rule for this. You can refer to this pos<\/a>t to learn how to manage and set up the nameservers for your domain.<\/p>\n Or you check out this video to learn how to manage DNS Records for Nameservers<\/p>\n