Some of our customers may have noticed something interesting about the way we had our servers set up. Until recently, all of our hosting servers had a unique set of nameservers, just for that hosting server. Normally, this is not a problem but we noticed how this was problematic for customers whenever we found that a server-to-server transfer of an account was needed because then the domain would need to be updated with new nameservers. This was especially aggravating for certain customers that take advantage of the parked-domain and addon-domain features of our servers since then they all had to be updated.
You can imagine how it could be slightly annoying to update the nameservers for fifty domains…
Well, not anymore anyway. Earlier last week, we rolled out our domain nameserver cluster. We went from having 28 different nameservers (2 for each server) to just two:
ns1.hostupon.com
ns2.hostupon.com
What does that mean for our existing customers? Well, it means that now if an account needs to be moved, you don’t need to update your domain nameservers. When the account transfer is finished, the new server ‘takes over’ the domain zone on the cluster and updates it to point to the right system. You no longer need to change nameservers whenever the account is moved.
There’s one other thing I will bring up though, which is the best part. Remember those 28 nameservers we had before? You can continue to use them. There is no need to change the nameservers to the ones I listed above! We updated all the old nameservers to point to the same domain cluster. The cluster has been in operation for the last week without a problem. Ultimately this is a purely ‘under-the-hood’ upgrade and is there simply to make account migrations that little-bit-more smooth. It will actually help quite a bit in this case as the downtime for domain nameserver changes is as much as 24 hours, but domain ‘a’ records update within four hours in most cases.
It also simplifies things when you need to figure out what your domain nameservers are since everyone on our shared servers now uses the same ones.
If you have any concerns or questions about this, feel free to contact us.
