What is Exoscale DNS?

Every computer, server or not, has an IP address such as 192.168.0.1. However, these IP addresses are pretty hard to remember. That’s why the Domain Name System, or DNS, exists.

DNS is responsible for turning domain names, such as example.com, into an IP address, such as 192.168.0.1. In other words, it lets you, for example, designate which Exoscale Compute instance should serve a particular domain name.

Note

It is also possible to find the domain name that belongs to a specific IP address. This is commonly known as reverse DNS. The reverse DNS for an IP address has to be set in the Exoscale Compute console instead of the DNS console.

How does Exoscale DNS work?

When customers want to use Exoscale DNS, they first need to purchase a plan in the Exoscale dashboard with a set number of zones. These zones correspond to the domain names they want to serve.

Next, they need to set up the zone/domain name. After creating the zone, they need to enter the records they want to serve. For example, if they wanted to point example.com to the IP address of 192.168.0.1, they would need a record such as this:

example.com 3600 IN A 192.168.0.1
example.com 3600 IN MX mail.yourprovider.com.

In layman’s terms, the A record type means that the website for that domain is at the given IP address. Similarly,MX records indicate that the e-mail server for the specified domain is at a given address. There are more record types for an extensive list see Wikipedia.

For the customer to use the DNS service, they need to do one more thing: they need to log in to the dashboard of their registrar (the company where they bought the domain) and change the nameserver settings for their domain to point to the Exoscale nameservers. This change takes up to 2 full days to take effect.

When an end user wants to open the given website, their computer queries the given address and caches it. This means that the computer will not re-request the IP address for the time of the TTL value (time to live, 3600 seconds in our example above) set in the Exoscale DNS dashboard.

Exoscale DNS Pricing

On Exoscale DNS, you only pay for the number of zones hosted. Therefore, there are no per-request or by-traffic fees.

Prices can be found on the Exoscale Pricing Page.