DNSonly like behaviour

titanblastpro

New member
Joined
Nov 24, 2025
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1
Hello,

I am a user transitioning from cPanel, where I primarily used it for managing my email and DNS hosting services, as well as those of my subusers. I would need to be on an Unlimited user license.

After their yet another price increase, I am looking for an alternative. DirectAdmin overall seems like a nice choice; however, since I am primarily using it for DNS and email, I was looking for a functionality like DNSonly.

To quickly go through, DNSonly servers on cPanel are like replicas of all DNS zones and records from the main server. This is done so it's more reliable, as having DNS on a separate machine and on more than one separate machine is way better than relying on the main cPanel server.

I am wondering if DirectAdmin has anything similar to this. Just so that it can be redundant. Ideally, also without license costs like it's on cPanel (WHM DNSonly is DNSonly and not full WHM/cPanel experience).

If something similar exists, please let me know as I would be incredibly happy to once and for all ditch cPanel for this specific use case, because every year constantly they strangle me more and more, and it's hard because I don’t even utilise all the features, yet keep paying more and more.

I am not looking to bypass or cheat account accounting, only to avoid paying more for DNS-only features while still paying the full licence price where the accounts are actually created and benefiting from the clustering reliability. Any integrations work for me, as long as they are reliable and stress-free (agai,n looking for the closest to DNS-only as possible).

Thank you very much in advance!

All the best
 
also without license costs like it's on cPanel (WHM DNSonly is DNSonly and not full WHM/cPanel experience).
Yes kind of. In fact the "free" DNSonly is already calculated in the price of cPanel.
Direct admin does not have any free DNS itself.

However, it doesn't say so but you can use the Personal Plus 5/month license for unlimited DNS if you use it for DNS only. For that price you're still nowhere near the price of a cPanel license with unlimited accounts, not even 5 accounts, LoL.

With this you can make use of the MultiServer setup from DA itself which replicates all DNS zones to the other server or VPS with the Personal Plus license.

There are other ways. For example you can use Directslave (also support on this forum) which is a free tool which can run on a very small VPS and you can even use it for multiple servers. This is really DNS only, no DA installation required.

Ofcourse others like PowerDNS are also an option.
 
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