Zone Activation

This article applies primarily to Custom DNS users. Every hour, DynDNS.com will look at zones that are inactive and decide whether to load the zone onto the name servers. If DynDNS.com sees that an inactive domain is properly delegated, it gets loaded onto the name servers.

After two weeks of unsuccessful checks, DynDNS.com will stop checking until you tell us to start checking again (which you can do through your Custom DNS zone's preference page.


WHOIS and DNS, different systems

When debugging zone activation, you must check WHOIS (which queries the domain registry system) and the DNS system separately. When you register a domain, it can take some time for the domain to appear in the registry. It used to take 12-24 hours for '.com' and '.net' domains to appear in the registry but now it takes only 15 minutes at most. The '.org' and '.biz' registries are nearly instantaneous.

Preactivation

For some TLDs that are added in Custom DNS, we will flag that zone to become active on the next zone activation run. We do this because some registries want to prevent lame delegations (delegating to a name server that does not answer for the domain). You can preactivate a zone by clicking the Preferences button on the zone's configuration page, then clicking Force Activation. (Please note you will not be able to edit the zone until it activates fully or the records have been loaded onto our nameservers, so make sure your zone is ready before preactivating.)

We preactivate the following TLDs: