We’ve just finished building and implementing a DNS cluster for all of our web hosting clients. Our DNS cluster is four nameservers based in four different data centres (Maindenhead, Manchester, Seattle and Denver). Spreading the nameservers about over the world increases redundancy of the system.
A DNS cluster is a number of name servers that share records, so if we create a site on a server, it’s records are copied to the four nameservers which has a number of benefits:
- if a server goes down, sites are back online quicker after it’s back because DNS was never down
- we can easily transfer hosting accounts around servers without the need to change nameservers with zero downtime
- one set of nameservers for all of our servers
- if their is a server outage, mail is not bounced immediately, mailservers will know to try again later. (within reason).
- if there was a catastrophic server failure, we can quickly route traffic to a different server
We’ll be pointing all our old nameservers at the cluster, so technically, existing clients don’t need to do anything to take advantage of this setup, however, we would recommend changing your nameservers to:
ns1.orchardhosting.com
94.76.207.114
ns2.orchardhosting.com
93.189.4.152
ns3.orchardhosting.com
63.223.120.195
ns4.orchardhosting.com
76.73.57.82
As having four new nameservers rather than the existing two is more reliable.
All new registrations will have the new nameservers set automatically.
Hi,
I have a number of domains held elsewhere that I have the DNS settings set to ns1.oh2-servers.com and ns2.oh2-servers.com, do I need to amend all those settings to the new names?
Thanks
Colin
You don’t need to amend them, they’ll still work as we’ll be pointing ns1.oh2-servers.com to ns1.orchardhosting.com and ns2.oh2-servers.com to ns2.orchardhosting.com.
However, if you want to make your hosted domains have slightly more resilience, you can also add the two extra nameservers, ns3.orchardhosting.com and ns4.orchardhosting.com to your domains.
“if you want to make your hosted domains have slightly more resilience, you can also add the two extra nameservers, ns3.orchardhosting.com and ns4.orchardhosting.com to your domains.”
How do we do this please Tom? Is there a noddy step by step guide somewhere?
Hi Godfrey,
If you bought the domains from us, log into your client area (http://orchardhosting.info/clients) and you can change the nameservers there. Change to: ns1.orchardhosting.com, ns2.orchardhosting.com, ns3.orchardhosting.com, ns4.orchardhosting.com
Or if you bought the domains from else where, log into their control panel and you’ll be able to edit the nameservers there.
If in doubt, open a support ticket by emailing help@orchardhosting.com
My domains are not registered with Orchard, and I decided to update all the nameservers on my registrar’s website. I then found I couldn’t access my e-mail. Also, I could access one of my websites, but not the others. After a bit of Googling I realised this was something to do with my ISP’s DNS cache, and would resolve itself in due course, but was irritating. I get the impression that it is probably only me (and maybe others who use my ISP?) who are likely to have this problem.
I found a solution that involves changing the DNS settings in my computer’s LAN settings from ‘Obtain DNS server automatically’ to Google’s DNS settings 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 and having done that I can now access my e-mail and websites again..
I’m not sure if this is the best way of dealing with the situation, but it worked for me.
Some ISPs do cache IPS for a long time, however the old IP in the cache should have still resolved.
We use Google’s DNS setting for the same reason in our office as ISP’s cache is ridiculously long.