Default DNS

Default DNS

Every time a new domain name is registered, it is assigned to a set of name servers, also known as default name servers. These name servers are the default name servers for the particular registrar or hosting company and are used to keep the domain name live from the beginning.

A lot of people register just a domain name, leaving it with the registrar's default name server settings, until they decide what to do with it. This is why a lot of registrars create default pages, which act as a website as long as the domain name still uses the default name servers. The default DNS settings provided by registrars are also used by cybersqatters, who register domain names, resembling a popular trademark with the intention of attracting visitors or selling it at a much higher price to the company, owner of the trademark.

Wildcard DNS

With the help of the wildcard DNS records all the queried host addresses having no IP records created for them (i.e. do not exist) can be set up to point to a certain address. In other words, you can set up certain non-existing hosts associated with your domain to point to a particular IP address, so that if any of these addresses is requested by someone online - a valid response for an existing host will be returned.

For example, if someone types the subdomain john.yourbestdomain.com in the browser, where yourbestdomain.com is your own domain but the subdomain itself does not exist, the browser will be redirected to the index page at yourbestdomain.com or to any specific error page of your choice, if you have default DNS records set up for your domain and a valid configuration on your Apache server.

You can set up default DNS records by creating a host record with the name of "*" (an asterisk) and assigning the IP address you want the DNS to return as a default domain resolution request result to it.

This is how a DNS Zone will look with a wildcard DNS record:

In order to further set up wildcard DNS records for a domain, you will have to modify its virtual host configuration on the Apache web server.

Here is how a general virtual host configuration looks like:

We will have to add a "ServerAlias" line:

This way, we tell the web server that any hostname before ".example.com" will also match "example.com"

NTC Hosting's default DNS

NTC Hosting provides two default DNS records for all web hosting packages. The default Primary and Secondary DNSs are listed in the Hosted Domains section of our Web Hosting Control Panel, and can be easily applied to your domain using the DNS management tools provided in the Domain manager. Any domain name registered with us will be automatically assigned to our default name servers.

Also, in order to provide a quality DNS hosting service, we use IP addresses from different C-class networks, allowing our clients to host domains that don't permit pointing to name servers from the same network.