I would like to use an external DNS service (such as www.easydns.com or www.worldwidedns.net) so my service is more reliable and I was wondering what type of settings need to be configured in WHM in order to do this. Is it best to set up the cPanel server as the primary DNS then have the external DNS service act as the secondary? Or, just run it all from the external service?

What type of settings do I need to configure in WHM to get this to work? I'm concerned about clients going in and creating sub-domains and that they will not work. I was going to enable wild cards in the DNS so I am hoping it won't cause a problem.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

IMHO, you will be better off if you have the primary running on your cpanel server and secondary running off the external DNS provider.

I am not sure if any of the 3rd party services have integration with CPanel so all you would need to do in CPanel is to configure it as a primary with no secondaries. For every domain added you will have to add the configuration with your 3rd party DNS provider. It's a PITA but there's nothing to beat the advantages of having DNS hosted on two different server on two different backbones.

Guarav,

Thanks for the info. This is the service I'm thinking about using: http://www.worldwidedns.net/. The good thing is it's not just on two different backbones/networks, but three! The third which is Rackspace.

I would think it wouldn't be that hard to set up cPanel as the primary and the external service as secondary, i'm just not sure how to do it. Here's what they say about the zone file transfers:

IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR ZONE FILE TRANSFERS: If you are using us for secondary zone files, be sure that your DNS server and firewall allow us to pull zone transfers from you using the following IPs 63.126.69.125, 63.126.67.253 and 65.61.159.86

The other thing is I have other websites hosted on servers on a different network (not just the ones running on the cPanel box) so I'm wondering if it would be best to just use World Wide DNS as my primary/secondary DNS since the other domains might confuse cPanel.

Jeff,

In Cpanel, when you create a new domain, dns configuration is done on primary and then using ssh the secondary dns server is configured. Now, worldwidedns.net won't provide you with ssh access to configure dns, so configuring secondary name servers in cpanel is out of question.

What you could do is to modify the named configuration file (/etc/named.conf) manually and add the allow-transfer directive.

E.g.:

zone "jeff244.com" {
type master;
file "/var/named/jeff244.com.db";
allow-transfer { 63.126.69.125; 63.126.67.253; 65.61.159.86; };
};

To get the desired changes automatically you could do some modifications in the cpanel scripts but it is prohibited under cpanel license.