Are there any drawbacks to using custom name servers?

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brettcameron9
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Good afternoon!

I set up a custom name server for my reseller account using your instructions. I created both ns1 and ns2 and directed them to my shared IP address. However, if I use your default name servers (ns1.servconfig.com & ns2.servconfig.com) I'm provided with 2 IP addresses.

From my understanding, the 2 default DNS servers would provide more redundancy. Unless they're both hosted on the same machine... And even then, as long as they're hosted on a different machine than my websites, it's still more redundancy than hosting my name server AND websites on the same machine.

I've seen this question asked in the comments several times, with the back-end details being skimmed over / ignored. DNS is one of, if not the most important aspect of running a website, right? Many large websites will host DNS separately with a dedicated host...

Should a novice even be messing around with this stuff? It's cool to have your own branded servers and all, and it will help if I have to move my clients sites... but if any problems arise I won't have a clue where to start...

I would really appreciate some clarification here!

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anonymous
Hello, brettcameron9! Thanks for posting your question regarding the drawbacks of using custom name servers. There are 2 methods for configuring your own name servers. The first is, as you described, the custom name servers. Since the DNS queries would be directed to the server at the IP of the custom name servers, then your name servers would indeed not have redundancy in regards to answering DNS queries. Keep in mind though that most queries are cached at the ISP level, so the amount of queries may not be as high as you may expect. But you are correct in that high traffic sites would generally host DNS and their website on separate servers. The second method is vanity name servers. If you would like to have name server redundancy, you could follow the steps in our vanity name servers guide to set this up. You would just need to make some DNS entries for our reseller public name server IPs: 
ns1.servconfig.com 216.194.168.112
ns2.servconfig.com 70.39.146.236
So if the vanity domain you wanted to use for your name servers was example.com, you'd just setup your ns1/2 records pointing to those IPs: 
ns1.example.com 216.194.168.112
ns2.example.com 70.39.146.236
Then you'd want to follow the other steps in this article about activating your name servers at your domain Registrar, and then assigning those name servers in WHM for your reseller account. I hope this helps! Sincerely, Carlos E