DNSonly like behaviour

[titanblastpro]

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

 

[Richard G]

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.

 

[titanblastpro]

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.

Hi,


Thank you very much for your quick reply. To be fair, $5 is not a problem at all. It comes to like $29 + 4 x$5 ($20) is completely reasonable for unlimited accounts (and much less than what I pay now)

However, the thing is I am not sure if I can combine a Standard licence with 4 x Personal Plus. Would this work even if domains are spread across many accounts on the slave (i.e., more than 2 that Personal Plus accounts for)?

Thank you!

 

[DrWizzle]

Hi,


Thank you very much for your quick reply. To be fair, $5 is not a problem at all. It comes to like $29 + 4 x$5 ($20) is completely reasonable for unlimited accounts (and much less than what I pay now)

However, the thing is I am not sure if I can combine a Standard licence with 4 x Personal Plus. Would this work even if domains are spread across many accounts on the slave (i.e., more than 2 that Personal Plus accounts for)?

Thank you!

As long as the main DA customer accounts are kept on your main server, with the $29 license on, you can easily get away with using 1 (or more) $5 licences on smaller VPS instances as DNS servers. As you're really only copying the DNS zones onto the VPS servers with MultiServer, a $5 is all you need. If you were mirroring servers for failover/CDN clusters etc, you'd need a full licence on all the servers.

To save even more money, depending on how hands on you are, look at DirectSlave (Search for the thread on this forum) and it's free to install on as many slave servers as you want without DA or the need for a DA license. It works the same as multiserver and uses the DA multiserver APIs to transfer zones. So in theory, a $29 licence for each full server setup for customers, $5 fo a personal plus DA licence (DNS Master) and X x FREE setups on your slave DNS servers with DirectSlave.

Multiple ways to do this, it's all down to personal preference, skill and budget.

And welcome to the dark side!!