Report this

What is the reason for this report?

How to run a DNS hosting through a droplet?

Posted on March 13, 2017

Is anyone running a DNS hosting through a droplet?

We use EPP to register and manage domains for our clients through whmcs and our provider is dropping their support for dns management through epp where we can only set nameservers instead.

We are considering on running our own dns hosting for clients with web/email forwarding options through a droplet. Perhaps bad idea since we have to write a module or use any existing so clients can modify their dns through whmcs client area.

is this possible? how would you guys do it instead?



This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

@dionedomingo

When it comes to setting up a DNS cluster, PowerDNS would probably be the easiest to work with as it has a built-in API that you can use to create a module for WHMCS (if there’s not already one).

Ideally, you’d setup two, three, or more Droplets and install PowerDNS on each one. This would be a standard master/slave setup (replication), though you could setup something more robust, it all really depends on what you need and how many domains you’re hosting or plan to host.

There’s an existing guide here at DigitalOcean that details how to go about setting up PowerDNS, so I’d take a look at it to get familiar. It was written for Ubuntu 14.04, though it should work the same with Ubuntu 16.04 or 16.10.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-configure-dns-replication-on-a-slave-powerdns-server-on-ubuntu-14-04

The PowerDNS API can be found here:

https://doc.powerdns.com/md/httpapi/README/

The developer cloud

Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Get started for free

Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*

*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.