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Our company domain is registered with Godaddy.com and we have 2 custom nameservers set up pointing at our server in Washington, which we use for our american websites.

ns1.ourCompany.com -> USA server
ns2.ourCompany.com -> USA server

We've recently hired a new VPS in Germany which we want to use for our European websites. Is it possible to configure a new set of nameservers on the same domain which will resolve to the EU server without having to hit the US server first?

ns3.ourCompany.com -> EU server
ns4.ourCompany.com -> EU server
cronoklee
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  • Is anycast what you ended up doing? When I read your question I interpret not that you want to re-route based on geolocation, but rather have your EU websites on the ns3/ns4 and don't want to route the request through ns1/ns2 to receive the DNS. I am in a similar situation and was curious if you found a good solution? – Tim Ramsey Mar 24 '17 at 00:12
  • No we didnt use anycast in the end. We ended up using our US server as a kind of DNS switchboard for our root domain. So the US server has simple DNS records for NS3/NS4 which just points at the EU server, where those nameservers reside. Not ideal but worked fine for us. – cronoklee Mar 24 '17 at 16:19
  • Yeah, that is what I am basically doing now, but I am adding more servers to the mix and if anything were to happen to the one server, then the others would also be down. Thanks for the update. – Tim Ramsey Mar 24 '17 at 16:21
  • I didn't need email for my main domain(ourCompany.com in your example). If you did, you would need to add additional host records on the server, but there is information [here](http://serverfault.com/questions/840304/multiple-nameservers-for-multiple-dedicated-servers-on-a-single-domain) to how I ended up solving this for my requirements. – Tim Ramsey Apr 12 '17 at 13:07

1 Answers1

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The solution for that is to run an anycast DNS service, which is not really a feasible solution for most small companies to manage for themselves.

Many registrars offer such anycast DNS services for their customers.

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HBruijn
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    And those many registrars are so cheap it's really not worth doing it yourself unless you're a huge company. AWS's solution is $0.50/month for a domain. Typing up a SF post probably costs more in salary than the next few years of service. – ceejayoz Jun 28 '16 at 13:34
  • Great thanks. I presume this is what Godaddy's "premium DNS" service is doing? – cronoklee Jun 28 '16 at 13:47
  • Yes, Godaddy is one such provider that offers anycast – HBruijn Jun 28 '16 at 13:57
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    @cronoklee Yes, but I'm dubious of the words "premium" and "GoDaddy" in the same sentence. – ceejayoz Jun 28 '16 at 13:57
  • Ha ha Thanks guys. One last clarification: Anycast looks to be for auto-routing visitors to the best server but what I was asking about was about setting up new nameservers for each region and manually giving each website a different nameserver so that it points to only one (local) server. My question is really around how to create 2 sets of *unrelated* nameservers on a single domain, pointing at different servers. Is anycast still the best option for this? – cronoklee Jun 28 '16 at 15:12
  • @cronoklee That's getting into the realm of more complicated things. Some providers offer something like that - AWS Route53 allows you to [route visitors based on geolocation](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/routing-policy.html#routing-policy-geo) - but you'd want replication between the various local servers (I'd be upset if my account went away because I flew from NYC to London). – ceejayoz Jun 28 '16 at 15:40