Best DNS Host Config

Typically we've hosted our primary DNS on a server other than our webserver. However, when creating new domains, the Plesk control panel automatically creates the appropriate entries in the DNS running on the webserver. We are considering having the primary DNS be the one on the webserver for simplicity sake. This prompted me to ask the question, what is the benefit of having the primary DNS run on a server other than the same server as the webserver for which it is providing DNS for?

The only answer I could think of is bandwidth conservation, but DNS traffic is very small compared to a website. If the server the website is running on goes down or becomes inaccessible due to a network fault, it doesn't matter that the DNS is inaccessible also since you can't get to the website anyway!

This also means a secondary DNS is really not that critical either. I would still use a secondary DNS on another server in case something went wrong with the DNS service and not Apache. But it really seams redundant to host a DNS on our webserver (which Plesk automatically does), then have to manage records on the actual primary server hosted by the ISP. Yes, they have a web control panel that allows you to add domains to their DNS and it reads the zone file for the initial setup, but it doesn't automatically perform zone transfers thereafter. So if you add a record to the DNS on our webserver, we have to also login to the web control panel there also. (I'm talking about Rackshack if anyone's interested).

Does anyone have any idea approximately how much bandwidth a DNS would use if it is serving for a collection of websites that get about 200,000 combined home page hits per month?

 

 

 

 

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