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mgjk
Asked: 2012-01-18 09:19:22 +0800 CST

DNS record for a subdomain on Dreamhost

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I'm currently hosting a subdomain for a charity on Dreamhost. The charity is in control of the DNS records, and they're slow to update them.

So for example.com:

www.example.com -> A-record webserver
mail.example.com -> A-record mail server

About a year ago, I asked them to create:

foo.example.com -> A-record to 173.236.135.58 (Dreamhost's particular web server)

Trouble is, Dreamhost could change that server's IP at any time. The charity is slow to change records, so this could create an extended outage.

Should this be an NS record? e.g., 

foo.example.com -> NS-record ns1.dreamhost.com, ns2.dreamhost.com, ns3.dreamhost.com
ns[1-3].dreamhost.com -> foo.example.com is 173.236.135.58

Or is there another way to do this which I'm missing...? It might seem like an elementary question, but I'd like to get them to correct the record and add a new one, and I'd rather their site kept running :-)

domain-name-system subdomain a-record ns-record dreamhost

1 Answers

  1. I suggest finding something like dyndns.org for keeping track of the changing IP address, dyndns.org will automatically update a free dns subdomain for you.

    Then, have your charity create a DNS CNAME record to point to the dynamic domain name you chose with dyndns.org.

    This method will require only the 1 change to be done by the charity, everything else will happen automatically.

    Note: I have only used dyndns for personal free usage, I am unsure if there will be a small fee for using with some sort of organization like a charity.

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