DNS Questions - How can I fix these from my DNS Report.

[jrkaiser]

http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/dnsrep...Dwgfaradio.com

FAIL Single Point of Failure ERROR: Although you have at least 2 NS records, they both point to the same server, resulting in a single point of failure.
You are required to have at least 2 nameservers per RFC 1035 section 2.2.

WARN Nameservers on separate class C's WARNING: All of your nameservers (listed at the parent nameservers) are in the same Class C (technically,
/24) address space, which means that they are probably at the same physical location. Your nameservers should be at geographically dispersed locations.
You should not have all of your nameservers at the same location. RFC2182
3.1 goes into more detail about secondary nameserver location.

WARN SOA EXPIRE value WARNING: Your SOA EXPIRE time is : 3600000 seconds.
This seems a bit high. You should consider decreasing this value to about 1209600 to 2419200 seconds (2 to 4 weeks). RFC1912 suggests 2-4 weeks. This is how long a secondary/slave nameserver will wait before considering its DNS data stale if it can't reach the primary nameserver.

WARN SOA REFRESH value WARNING: Your SOA REFRESH interval is : 86400 seconds. This seems high. You should consider decreasing this value to about 3600-7200 seconds (or higher, if using DNS NOTIFY). RFC1912 2.2 recommends a value between 1200 to 43200 seconds (20 minutes to 12 hours, with the longer time periods used for very slow Internet connections), and if you are using DNS NOTIFY the refresh value is not as important (RIPE recommend 86400 seconds if using DNS NOTIFY). This value determines how often secondary/slave nameservers check with the master for updates. A value that is too high will cause DNS changes to be in limbo for a long time.

WARN SPF record Your domain does not have an SPF record. This means that spammers can easily send out E-mail that looks like it came from your domain, which can make your domain look bad (if the recipient thinks you really sent it), and can cost you money (when people complain to you, rather than the spammer). You may want to add an SPF record ASAP, as 01 Oct 2004 was the target date for domains to have SPF records in place (Hotmail, for example, started checking SPF records on 01 Oct 2004).

[kobra]

The first 4 are nothing to be concerned about....

The WARN SPF record depends on your accout status.

Are you on shared hosting or on a reseller account?

If a reseller account - you can add a SPF record

If shared hostng - you can open a ticket and H9 can add one for you

Added: As this is in the reseller category - you can mail me at my sig through this forum and I can mail you back how to add a SPF Record....

[arts99]

I am not an expert but there must be a reason for these warnings on the dnsreport.

Specially regarding the single point of failure. Can anyone please explain.

[arts99]

So it does matter, the single point of failure. Today we have experienced downtime twice. Once in the morning and the other one in the evening.

In the evening server1 had to be restarted so our website, our databases and email all got effected.

I think its essential to have some redundant servers, which shall be able to kick in if the original one has any problems.

[kobra]

art99,

I think its essential to have some redundant servers, which shall be able to kick in if the original one has any problems.

Your original reference to this concerned "nameservers" being on the same server and has nothing to do with redundant web servers...

Again nothing redundant to do with the web server.

[colt45]

I think it boils down to that: how much do you want to spend for your hosting?

To have "redundant" servers would require server mirroring with at least 2 complete and identical servers, doubling your cost for hosting.

The OP's question about the DNS report's single point failure for nameservers is valid but it doesn't help to have completely seperate and isolated DNS servers when your web server crashes because your site will be down and inaccessible even though the nameservers are still running.

It's nice to have hosting that conforms to all the rules and never fails because it has server mirroring but is it really worth it? If your answer is yes, why are you with HostNine?

I moved to H9 from a hosting provider that did have separate nameservers and a separate MySQL server and a separate mail server and an IP address for each domain and the stealth nameservers didn't leak, etc. etc. etc. (but no mirroring) and I might still be with them if they would just turn off the register_globals. But for the same amount of storage and bandwidth it would cost me 3 times what H9 charges.

I've experienced slowdowns and outages on H9 but they've always been brief. For the other 99.9% of the time the server my account is on here at H9 runs 3-5 times faster than at my old hosting provider.

I guess I'm just happy as a puppy with H9?