DNS

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a system by which internet domain name-to-address and address-to-name resolutions are determined. All domains and their components, such as mail servers, utilize DNS to resolve to the appropriate locations. DNS servers are usually set up in a master-slave relationship such that failure of the master invokes the slave. DNS servers may also be clustered or replicated such that changes made to one DNS server are automatically propagated to other active servers.

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DNS understands only ASCII, so the Cloud DNS Service provides conversion between UTF-8 and ASCII on all calls into the system.

Domain

A domain is an entity/container of all DNS-related information containing one or more records.

Subdomain

Subdomains are domains within a parent domain, and subdomains cannot be registered. Subdomains allow you to delegate domains. Subdomains can themselves have subdomains, so third-level, fourth-level, fifth-level, and deeper levels of nesting are possible.

Record

A DNS record belongs to a particular domain and is used to specify information about the domain. There are several types of DNS records. Each record type contains particular information used to describe that record’s purpose. Examples include mail exchange (MX) records, which specify the mail server for a particular domain, and name server (NS) records, which specify the authoritative name servers for a domain.

Domain owner

Within Rackspace DNS, the account which creates the domain is the domain owner.

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Domain registration is currently outside the scope of the Rackspace DNS API. Any references to ownership and management of domain information is only relevant within the context of the Rackspace DNS system.