Keeping DNS at one place. What possibilities are out there?

Question

I host a couple of websites for some customers. So basically what they do is change their A Record to my server's IP and everything works fine.

Now I want to upgrade my server and of course my clients have to change their A Record.

So what I want for the future is to keep my flexibility in choice of servers without having to annoy my customers with changing their A Record.

Basically what would be great is a nice service which is reliable and gives me the possibility to redirect the A Record to a new server. Also I thought of using a second server as a load balancer.

Anyone good experiences with either of these solutions or even has other ideas?

Answer 1

What you're looking for is either a dynamic DNS service (there are many) or to just run your own DNS servers and have your clients make your servers authoritative for their domains.

Answer 2

Your customers could create a www subdomain instead of an www A record and the delegate this domain to your DNS server. You could then decide to which webserver this should send users' HTTP requests to with a default * A record.

Answer 3

We host our own DNS servers and instruct the client to point the domain at them. There really is no other good way to handle it. As far as load balancing, get a load balancer (dedicated hardware or a software appliance) and set it up to route info from the public IPs on the load balancer to the private IPs of the server. This gives you the flexibility to move servers around internally without ever changing the public IPs.

Answer 4

Create a www.myhostingservice.example in your zone and ask your clients to make www.clientdomain.example an alias (CNAME) pointing to www.myhostingservice.example.