Secondary DNS

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Configure Secondary DNS to add disaster recovery capability to your DNS service.

What is Secondary DNS

Secondary DNS is a disaster recovery solution provided by Alibaba Cloud DNS for users operating on-premises or third-party DNS systems.

When Secondary DNS is enabled for a domain, your existing nameserver acts as the Primary DNS, while Alibaba Cloud DNS serves as the Secondary DNS. Utilizing standard RFC-compliant Zone Transfer protocols (AXFR/IXFR), DNS zone data is synchronized between the primary and secondary servers. If the primary DNS experiences downtime or network disruption, the secondary DNS continues serving queries seamlessly, ensuring global business continuity.

Benefits

  • Disaster recovery & high availability

    Mitigate business disruption risks. If the primary DNS encounters an outage, the secondary DNS handles incoming resolution requests to guarantee high service availability.

  • Stable & reliable

    Backed by a 100% uptime SLA, Alibaba Cloud DNS leverages globally distributed clusters with cross-region failover to deliver zero-downtime performance.

  • Global nodes

    Accelerate DNS query responses. Points of Presence (PoPs) deployed worldwide and continuously expanding data centers optimize cross-border routing and deliver a responsive user experience.

  • Load balancing

    Distribute query volume. By deploying both primary and secondary nameservers to resolve queries simultaneously, DNS traffic is balanced across providers.

  • Robust security

    Real-time threat mitigation backed by 10+ Tbps bandwidth. Configure your primary DNS as a Hidden Master to serve public queries solely through Alibaba Cloud DNS to shield your origin DNS infrastructure from DDoS attacks and unauthorized exposure.