Creating a new zone

This article explains the process of adding individual zones manually. Alternatively, you can import a zone file from your existing or previous DNS provider.

To create a new zone:

1. In the NS1 portal, select DNS from the main navigation bar to view a list of all DNS zones associated with your account.
   
   
   
   
2. Click the "+" button on the right side of the screen.
   
   
3. Enter a valid domain name.
   
   
   
   
4. Select the type of zone you are creating and adjust the zone configuration settings as desired.
   
   Refer to this article for instructions on how to create a linked zone.
   
   There are five TTL values you can define:
   WARNING
   We do not recommend modifying the default TTL settings unless you have a specific need to do so.

   • SOA TTL
     The interval at which the SOA record itself is refreshed.

   • Refresh TTL
     The interval at which child servers (secondary DNS) are set to refresh the parent zone file from the parent server.

   • Retry TTL
     The rate at which a child server will retry to refresh the parent zone file if the initial refresh failed.

   • Expiry TTL
     If refresh and/or retry fail repeatedly, this is the time period after which the parent should be considered gone and no longer authoritative for the given zone.

   • NX TTL
     In the event that requesting the domain results in a non-existent query (NXDOMAIN), this is the amount of time respected by the recursor to return the NXDOMAIN response.

   Refer to the article Best practices: TTL configuration to learn more about setting time-to-live values.

5. When finished, click Save Zone. The new zone will appear in the list and will be populated with an NS record with an associated NS1 nameserver.

6. Proceed by adding records to the zone.