Why Use Free DNS Hosting Services?

Why Use Free DNS Hosting Services?

Free DNS hosting services are useful if you:

• Need secondary DNS servers.
• Need MX records for a virtual domain.
• Want control over your DNS records: change DNS frequently, changing ISPs soon.
• Can't get free service from an ISP and don't want to do it yourself.
• Are inside of a firewall and need publicly-accessible name servers outside of your firewall.
• Need name servers that are closer to the North American Internet backbones.

Providing additional secondary servers can greatly improve the reliability and accessibility of your domain.  If your primary DNS becomes unavailable due to network problems, your secondary DNS entries come into play, so the more DNS servers you have, the greater the resilience to errors.

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Free DNS Providers

• Bur.st - If you live in Australia, they can provide you with a set of of reliable backup DNS servers (secondary DNS) for your domains should your primary server go down.  They also offer Mail/MX seconding, providing you with three reliable backup mail servers.  You van also have a Mail alias/forwarder.  An alias or forwarder is where you have an email address user@bur.st forwarding to another account, such as the POP3 account provided by your ISP.  This is useful if you want a vanity email address, don't want people to see your real account's address, or don't want to be tied to an ISP for your email (you can change ISPs and simply point your alias to the new account without anyone noticing).
  
• Edit DNS - Services include free DNS hosting (web-based interface for adding/modifying/deleting records for your domain name; it supports A, CNAME, MX, NS, TXT, PTR, and AAAA records), free backup DNS (secondary nameserver for your domain name, and they will automatically grab your records from your master nameserver), dynamic DNS (automatically update your dynamic IP address for your domain as soon as it changes), free subdomains of your domainname, free web forwarding, and e-mail forwarding, email hosting, and email backup services.
  
• FreeDNS.afraid.org - Free subdomain and domain and backup DNS hosting. Instantly point yourname.afraid.org or yourname.com to any IP or URL on the Internet. Supports every TLD. Support for IPv6, dynamic DNS, URL cloaking, CNAME, A, AAAA, MX, and NS records. Round robin DNS supported (Multiple IP addresses for 1 hostname)
  
• Gratis DNS - For Danish ("For det danske folk").
  
• No-IP - Provides free dynamic and static DNS services under various domain names.  With this free service you can run your own server and have one of their domain names (8 choices) point to your IP address.  You can also set the MX record for email.  The dynamic DNS service also provides a downloadable client that keeps track of your changing IP address.  They also provide free URL redirection using their domain hopto.org.
  
• Twisted4Life - Free Secondary DNS for your domains.
  
• VDirect - Offers domain and email redirection, with cloaking and website statistics.  You can choose either a banner (bottom of your page), popup banner, or a banner delay page (or pay for no adverts).
  
• XName - Provides you with primary and secondary name servers.
  
• ZoneEdit - Provides free DNS, domain forwarding, email forwarding, and domain parking for up to 5 domains. You can pay for additional domains.
  

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DNS Related Links

• DNS Stuff - Get a free DNS report which reports useful DNS information about your domain names (was previously dnsreport.com). It also features several free networking tools - Check DNS timing; DNS, Reverse DNS, NetGeo, IP and domain WHOIS lookup; Abuse and Spam database lookup; Tracert and Ping; URL deobfuscator; CIDR/Netmask Lookup; Decimal IP conversion.