One vital component of your website is the DNS. The key to a successful domain name server is geographic diversity. Many websites have both their nameservers on the same server. That’s fine, but you may wish to consider a “secondary DNS” service, such as Backup DNS.

What a secondary service does is offers a third DNS server, which would be located in an another part of the country, or the world. In the event that your BIND– or domain server– goes down, as long as your Apache service is up, your website will still serve. In the event that your entire server is down, users will see an error message that indicates there’s a technical problem as opposed to your website not existing.

Obviously, if you run a dedicated server, and your DNS is on the same server as the rest of your services (Apache, SQL, etc.), it may seem redundant to employ a secondary DNS. However, you never know when such a service may come in handy, and the cost is minimal. You could even have a friend who runs a DNS host a zone file for you. The only change you will need to make is to add the appropriate nameserver information to your local DNS zone, so that the additional DNS is “authoritative”.

One final point is this: you can never have too many DNS, and the wise move is if you have several DNS, that they are spread out at key points around the world, so that if a backbone goes down in one portion of the globe, users can still find your website. Downtime for a website defeats the point of having a site in the first place.