What is a Domain Registration?

A domain name is essentially online real estate, and domain registration provides temporary ownership over that real estate. Domain registrations are leased to the registrant in yearly increments, usually between one and ten years, and allow the registrant to "build" on this property by offering services such as websites, email and FTP for personal, commercial, or public use. DynDNS offers a Domain Registration service for users who would like to purchase a domain name.

Delegation

In addition to providing ownership, domain registrations hold the name server delegation for a domain. Delegation assigns DNS resolution duties to name servers, directing queries for the domain to its DNS provider. A domain requires both registration and DNS to function; a registered domain without DNS cannot tell people where to find web services, and a name server with DNS information about an unregistered domain has no authority or ability to resolve queries for that domain.

Despite being closely linked, DNS service and registration are not identical or interchangeable. In fact, DNS service and domain registration can be provided by separate entities. For example, if you have a domain registered with another company, you can still use our Custom DNS service by changing the delegation to use our name servers instead of theirs.

Delegation changes can be performed at any time; however, depending on the TLD of your domain, the delegation may not immediately take effect. (Please see the Domain Information Chart for further information on common TLDs and their delegation change delays.) Furthermore, some cached queries may continue to go to the old DNS provider for up to four days after a delegation change. To minimize potential downtime during a delegation change, please see our Changing DNS Providers Without Downtime article.

Glue Records

Before a new name server can be used, a glue record needs to be created for the name server at the registry. Glue records provide information on a name server, such as the IP address and responsible registrar, and prevent a chicken-and-egg problem with DNS resolution: without a glue record, it would not be possible to initially locate a name server to ask it for information about itself and the domains it serves.

If you have third-party DNS for your domain (such as our Custom DNS service), you will not need to create glue records, as your DNS provider already has glue records for their name servers. If you wish to provide DNS for your own domain using a DNS server application such as BIND, you can create glue records through your account's domain registration interface or by contacting your registrar to request glue records. You may also be interested in a Secondary DNS service to provide redundancy and stability for your domain's resolution.

Because glue records have high TTLs, changes to glue can take up to 48-96 hours to fully propagate, making it impractical or impossible to host DNS for a domain on a dynamic IP address.