To run a business in today’s digital age, you need more than a stellar business plan and exciting products. You also need a successful online presence–a domain name, website, and email server–and you need to know how to manage them. After you buy a domain name from a registrar, suddenly, you’ll have to deal with questions like “What is a DNS zone?” Or “How can I protect my domain?” You never imagined you would need to answer these questions as a business owner.
However, if you want to know how to keep your domain, website, email, and other online assets accessible to your users at all times without leaving yourself vulnerable to attacks, you need to learn about domain names, zones, and how to manage them.
Why? In short, DNS zones are like the address books of the internet; they direct your customers to your website, application servers, or any other service’s correct network location. DNS zones also play a crucial role in how well you’re protected from cyber threats. In 2021, 88% of organizations became victims of attacks either against their DNS servers or using DNS to find their target, so knowing how to secure your DNS servers and zone records is extremely important.
What are DNS domains and zones?
In order to understand DNS domains, we first need to understand the meaning of the acronym DNS. DNS stands for the Domain Name System, which is like the internet’s phone book (we like to think of it as a distributed database). It translates human-friendly website names, like “www.yourwebsite.com”, into computer-friendly IP addresses, like 156.154.120.112.
Think of a domain name as a section of the internet under your control, your own private digital kingdom (that’s why we call it a “domain”), and the zone as your own slice of the internet’s address book and part of the “.com” chapter. In this zone, you can point the names (called a Fully-Qualified Domain Name, or FQDN) inside of your domain (like www.yourwebsite.com for your website) to an IP address where a server resides.
This translation from FQDN to IP address inside of a zone is crucial because computers use IP addresses to find your website or other online services across a network.
While most people use “domain” and “zone” interchangeably, there is a small but subtle difference between the two. Zone normally means “domain” but can refer to any level of the DNS hierarchy, like a domain, subdomain, or top-level domains like .com, .us, and .org.
The importance of DNS domain names and zones for businesses.
As mentioned earlier, the DNS and zones inside of it direct Internet traffic to a business’s online assets, such as their website, application servers, and email services. While that’s simple to understand in theory, there are many implementation details for domain names and zones.
Ensuring continuous accessibility
Having an online presence means your team, customers, and users should be able to access your business whenever and from wherever they need to. An outage of a DNS zone means that users won’t be able to find services inside of your domain. Because of this, the best practice for a domain is to use multiple diversified servers with synchronized zone information across all of them so that a site, network, or power outage won’t impact the entire domain.
Some advanced DNS servers allow businesses to load-balance traffic and failover traffic inside of a zone across multiple servers and even data centers.
Website and digital asset performance.
Slow-loading websites mean unhappy users, directly impacting a business’s online revenue. 40% of shoppers abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, and this attention span shrinks every year. If you want to grow user adoption and the resulting online sales, you need to do everything in your power to ensure the instantaneous loading of your content, and that speed starts with a high-performing DNS server and zone configuration.
Working with a DNS provider with a resilient infrastructure that can ensure fast and reliable access to your website 24/7/365 can go a long way to maintaining top performance – and keeping your customers happy, engaged, and buying your products and services.
Security.
DNS servers, domain names, and zones are constantly attacked. Cyber criminals use DNS every day to gain access to valuable data, shutdown services, and perform other malicious activities. DNS-based attacks, either directed at DNS servers or using DNS to resolve IP addresses of targets, make up 80 to 90% of all cyber attacks.
Attacks against DNS servers include:
- Low-volume enumeration attacks to find used nonstandard FQDNs that you use.
- Leaking of internal computer networks via an insecure zone setup.
- Domain hijacking attacks where attackers point the zone at their own services.
- Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks to take down a DNS server and all of the zones and records that it hosts.
Without knowing how to protect your DNS ecosystem, you increase your risk of having to deal with a costly and damaging cyber attack.
DNS for Identification and Authentication.
DNS is also used for various uses where it is important to identify that a third-party service is allowed to use your domain name. For example, you might be requested to configure a zone record for any of the following purposes:
- Outbound email servers
- TLS/SSL certificates
- Website monitoring services
- Website plugins
Components of a DNS zone.
DNS zones are made up of several components. Each component, or “resource record,” contains data that is used to manage how traffic is directed for your domain. These records typically hold IP addresses but could contain other data, such as an authentication token.
Here are the most common records inside a DNS zone:
- SOA record: The first and only compulsory record in every DNS zone, containing information about the zone, like the primary name server, the email of the domain administrator, and timing parameters for how long the zone can be cached on other servers.
- NS records: These records indicate which DNS servers can provide authoritative answers for your domain. These servers need a synced copy of the zone to answer queries for your domain.
- A and AAAA records: These records connect hostnames (FQDNs) to their respective IP addresses. A records are for IP version 4 (IPv4) addresses, and AAAA records are for IP version 6 (IPv6) addresses.
- CNAME records: These create aliases, or pointers, from one FQDN to another FQDN so that one change to a service can be performed and all of the services that point to it can also be changed simultaneously.
- MX Records: These specify the mail servers responsible for accepting emails for your domain.
- TXT records: These are free-form text entries and are used for various purposes, like verifying domain ownership and outgoing email servers.
- SRV records: These define the location (IP address) of servers for specific services, such as XMPP for a messaging server.
- PTR records: These are used for reverse DNS lookups, mapping an IP address to a hostname.
How do domain names and zones work?
Setting up a domain name and zone follows a process. DNS zones work as part of the Domain Name System (DNS) to help route internet traffic. Here’s a simplified explanation of how they work:
Domain registration: When you register a domain name (like yourbusiness.com), the registrar sets the authoritative DNS servers for the domain to their “parking lot” where they host a zone file that points to a “generic” landing page.
Authoritative DNS servers: Authoritative servers hold the zone file for your domain. When you have set up your zone on a set of authoritative DNS servers, you change your domain registration at the registrar to use your authoritative servers.
Resource records: Within a DNS zone, you can create resource records that contain information on how to answer a specific type of query. Each resource record is a row in the distributed database that is the DNS system. Resource records hold the type of query, the TTL, and the answer. For example: “A 120 156.154.120.4” means an A query type, a TTL of 120 seconds, and an answer with an IP address of 156.154.120.4.
Time-To-Live: The Start of Authority and each resource record in a zone use a timing parameter called a Time-To-Live (TTL) which is the maximum time in seconds that a DNS resolver can cache, or store, the answer. This reduces the amount of time that it takes for a computer to get an answer from their local resolver and reduces the number of queries that the authoritative DNS server receives.
DNS query: When a person or a program on their computer wants to view the information in your zone, their computer sends a DNS query, a request for a zone record, to a resolver service which finds the answer and replies back. Most DNS queries are for A or AAAA record types and are answered with an IP address.
DNS resolver: Networks provide a DNS service that receives queries from computers on the network. The process of receiving a query and providing an answer is called “DNS resolution”. DNS resolvers can perform recursion themselves or they can forward queries to another resolver that performs recursion. Most of the time, resolvers will cache query answers according to the TTL specified in the resulting query answer which is in itself determined by the zone file.
DNS recursion: DNS recursion is when a server navigates the DNS hierarchy to determine the query answer from your authoritative DNS servers.
In essence, DNS zones work by holding and managing DNS resource records, which in turn guide the authoritative DNS servers in answering queries from a recursive DNS server. Proper management of a DNS zone and its associated resource records is crucial for ensuring users can reliably and quickly connect to your website or online service.
The value of DNS infrastructure providers.
Managing authoritative DNS servers and zones becomes exponentially more complex as the users and resource records grow. Running an online service for millions of concurrent users requires multiple distributed authoritative DNS servers, data centers, and large network connections to respond to the volume of DNS queries without impacting performance.
DNS infrastructure service providers are specialized service providers that handle all aspects of managing DNS infrastructure for a business. They take care of the technical details for managing zones and resource records, allowing businesses to focus on their core operations.
With a top DNS infrastructure provider, businesses can secure their domain names, zones, and resource records and ensure their website, application servers, and email servers are always accessible and able to meet traffic demands easily.
Security benefits of managed DNS services.
As mentioned earlier, security risks and DNS go hand-in-hand. DNS zones need many protections to ensure their availability and integrity. Whenever a query is sent to an authoritative DNS server, it is an opportunity for something to go wrong.
DNS infrastructure providers implement counters to a wide variety of attacks:
- Massive scale to absorb high query volume.
- Distributed Denial of Service Protection.
- Server operating system hardening.
- DNS server software hardening.
- Network-level blocking of non-DNS traffic.
- Secure management of zone information.
- Integrated DNSSEC for zone integrity.
Operational benefits of DNS infrastructure services.
DNS infrastructure providers go beyond security, they can help your online environment run smoothly too. Solutions such as authoritative DNS from an infrastructure provider can improve DNS resolution, leading to faster website load times, increased reliability, and a better user experience.
DNS infrastructure providers manage many aspects of their platform:
- Capacity planning and deployment strategy.
- Installation and updating of DNS server software.
- Management of zones and resource records through a web interface.
- Managing multiple Points of Presence, datacenters, and network connections.
- Advanced features like site failover and geographic resolution.
Managed services also provide reliability, so you can relax knowing your website or online service will be accessible every time.
Work with Vercara for exceptional DNS management.
At Vercara, we’re experts at giving businesses an edge with DNS performance and availability for millions of concurrent users. We provide a high-tech DNS infrastructure service with a massive global scale and redundancy that offers high throughput, robust protection against attacks, and advanced features such as load-balancing to keep your websites and services available. This optimizes your user adoption and the resulting revenue.
With our expertise, you can focus on your core business while we ensure your online presence is secure, efficient, and always accessible.
Trust Vercara, your partner in exceptional DNS infrastructure. Contact us today to get started.
