Free Secondary DNS

Secondary DNS gives your domain a second, independent set of nameservers, so it keeps resolving even if your primary DNS provider has an outage. ice.domains offers free secondary DNS on its global anycast network - redundancy that most providers sell as an enterprise add-on, at $0.

Why a single DNS provider is a single point of failure

When DNS goes down, everything on the domain goes down at once - website, email, APIs, internal tools - even though the servers behind them are perfectly healthy. Large-scale outages at major DNS providers (the 2016 Dyn attack took out Twitter, Spotify, and GitHub for hours) proved that even top-tier infrastructure fails. The defense is boring and effective: publish nameservers from two independent providers, so resolvers automatically use whichever one answers.

How secondary DNS works

Your domain's NS set at the registrar lists nameservers from both providers, for example:

example.com.  NS  ns1.primary-provider.com.
example.com.  NS  ns2.primary-provider.com.
example.com.  NS  ns1.ice.domains.
example.com.  NS  ns2.ice.domains.

Resolvers pick among all four and retry another if one fails. As long as both providers serve identical records, users get correct answers no matter which one responds. If the primary goes dark, the ice.domains anycast network keeps answering and your domain stays up.

Setting up free secondary DNS at ice.domains

1. Create a free account and add your domain as a zone.
2. Mirror your records. Add the same A, CNAME, MX, and TXT records your primary serves - import detects most of them automatically.
3. Add our nameservers to your NS set at the registrar, alongside the existing ones (don't replace them - that would make us primary).
4. Keep the zones in sync. When you change a record at the primary, mirror the change here - or automate it against our REST API from your deployment pipeline.

Secondary DNS vs. multi-provider "primary-primary"

Classic secondary DNS uses zone transfers (AXFR) where the secondary pulls records from the primary automatically. The setup above is technically primary-primary: both providers hold an independently editable copy. For most teams that's simpler and just as resilient; the trade-off is remembering to apply changes in both places (an API script removes even that). Either way, the resilience benefit is identical - two independent networks answering for your domain.

Who should use secondary DNS?

• E-commerce and SaaS - DNS downtime is direct revenue loss.
• Email-critical domains - bounced mail from an unresolvable MX is often unrecoverable.
• Anyone who remembers a big DNS outage - the cost of prevention here is one free account and ten minutes; there's no paid tier to outgrow.

Not sure your current provider even needs a backup? Adding ice.domains as secondary costs nothing to try - and if you later want us as your only provider, just update the NS set. Full details of what's included are on the free DNS hosting page.