FAQ
Here are some commonly asked questions. If you have any other questions, feel free to join our IRC channel
#servfail on hackint or the bridged Matrix room #servfail:hackint.org to ask us.
Where do you fit in? What do you do, actually?
We're an authoritative NS provider. See resolution basics to learn what this means in technical terms, but the gist is:
- you buy, or otherwise obtain a domain
- we host nameservers
- you can go to your registrar (the place where you bought the domain) and ask them "hey! from now on, I'd like to use the NS servers hosted by those folks, they're cool"
- after the initial setup (described in Delegating a domain), you will be able to use our UI for modifying all your DNS records, along with all the extra features we provide
Do you do TLS certificates?
We only provide nameservers; To get TLS certificates, you should turn to Let's Encrypt. Check out certbot if you don't know how to get started.
For Let's Encrypt wildcard certificates, check out certbot-dns-pdns, which can be used through our API proxy.
List of NS servers / Where to delegate my domains?
The current list of NS servers you can delegate your domains to is currently available in the new zone modal, after login.
For a more general overview of this topic, see delegation.
API?
We expose a PowerDNS-compatible API under https://beta.servfail.network/api/v1/servers/{server}/zones/{zone}.
More information about this feature is available in the API section.
The API proxy is somewhat WIP and we may be missing a few endpoints. This will get finished in the coming days.
It says my domain isn't delegated!
Don't panic. Check if your domain is actually delegated to us yet (whois/ask your registrar/idk). If it is, and it still failed - try again a few more times (F5 and resend is OK). Also, please report this issue, alongside your domain name. Some particular TLDs can fail non-deterministically, and we haven't had a chance to debug this sufficiently yet.