DNS Hosting Service Recommendations or Options?

[JnascECSI]

So for the last 3 years we have been allowing our Plesk box to host DNS & run as the name server which i want to get away from. I have been looking for a DNS hosting service that we can use to host our own dedicated DNS Name Servers but there seems to be alot of them out there. Some with low pricing and some that are out of this world on pricing.

Currently our plesk boxes are not on our corporate network but at a co-location. I also thought about doing it internally off our corporate network since we have a full c-class subnet and only use about 20 of the 254 IP's we have.

Can anyone recommend a good DNS hosting provider? Or Maybe some advice on running our own DNS Servers that's cost effective?

Any help or pointers would be great.

[faris]

I'm curious to know why you want to move away from having your Plesk servers do the DNS? It is a neat and simple solution, with no significant drawbacks that I can think of. In fact now that I think about it I have no idea why we don't just let Plesk get on with it (we have separate DNS servers - I can't remember why).

A new option for you to consider would be to get two cheap Centos VPSes (different providers, different data centres) and either use 4PSA's DNS Manager, which automates everything -- it is basically set and forget -- or manually set up the DNS each time you add a domain to Plesk, or use one of the automation scripts that are available. I seem to recall Scott had one at one point, in beta.

Alternatively keep the Plesk box as primary and just get one VPS for a DNS server and make it a Secondary. That will simplify things.

[JnascECSI]

The main reason i was thinking of taking the DNS away from plesk was because of a upcoming server migration i have to do. The colo where our current server is at is having some blocks of IP's being revoked by arin and it happens that all the iP's i have are in that block. Since all the ip's have to change i decided to get a new dedicated plesk server setup with all the new ip's because the current server i have is 4 years old hardware wise.

Currently the Old server is hosting our NS1.domain.com & NS2.domain.com DNS name servers & i'm not sure how to make the migration over to the new box without having to have all our clients change their name servers to NS3.domain.com & NS4.domain.com . Since NS1 & NS2 are loosing the IP's i have to migrate everyone by Nov 15th deadline and since i'm not a DNS guru my brain is fogged on the best way to make this migration smooth without having a 100 cleints changing names servers in their registar accounts.

[biggles]

Alternatively keep the Plesk box as primary and just get one VPS for a DNS server and make it a Secondary. That will simplify things.

I am using this option and use xname for secondary dns. Works like a charm.

[Galactic Zero]

Setup the secondary NS DNS on the new box and use the migration tool to move sites from old to new, once that is done, move the NS1 to new box and off you go. I believe it is as simple as that, someone correct me if I'm wrong.

[JnascECSI]

Setup the secondary NS DNS on the new box and use the migration tool to move sites from old to new, once that is done, move the NS1 to new box and off you go. I believe it is as simple as that, someone correct me if I'm wrong.

That's what i was thinking also but my brain and knowledge of doing it properly are getting the best of me.

[spaceout]

Setup the secondary NS DNS on the new box and use the migration tool to move sites from old to new, once that is done, move the NS1 to new box and off you go. I believe it is as simple as that, someone correct me if I'm wrong.

I just migrated about 200 domains this way and it worked great. The only thing you need to remember is that the migration tool in Plesk doesn't move over any custom DNS entries. It also doesn't set up SSL certificates properly. It moves the files fine, but you have to go into Plesk and manually assign the certs to the domains. It also doesn't properly migrate the "Use same httpdocs folder for SSL" setting so you need to check that if it applies.

[faris]

Three additions here:

1) In order to stop email being lost, you would need to block port 25 on the old server before starting the migration. You should also set a short TTL on the DNS for all domains before starting.

2) You might actually want to block access to web stuff too in order to make sure no database updates get lost either.

3) There was an issue in Plesk 8.6 where the migration manager "lost" auto-increment on tables during database migrations under certain circumstances. I don't know if this was fixed with subsequent hotfixes, but somewhere in the Parallels forum, under Plesk 8.6 think, you should find a long thread about it. I don't think this applies to 9.x migrations though.

[faris]

Errr... obviously you can do a dry run to see how it goes, without blocking anything. If everything looks good after the migration, delete all the clients and domains and start again for real.

Faris.