After EveryDNS and EditDNS's outage, I have finally got my act together to have this redundant and free DNS running for some of my domains. I know both EveryDNS and EditDNS have 4 geographically separated servers, however during the event when the vendor is targeted for DDoS, I am still suffering downtime when their servers stuggle to stay alive. Therefore, instead of having your zone resiting on only one free DNS provider, you can get your domain hosted by both of them. Therefore just in case all servers of one provider get DDoS'ed, your domain can still stay visible on the net as the servers from the other provider are still answering requests.

The idea is to have one as primary DNS, and the other one as secondary. I am using EditDNS as primary because I found their interface easier to work with than EveryDNS's.

Alright. Here are the steps.

1. Setting up Primary DNS at EditDNS

Go to EditDNS and sign up an account if you haven't. Then add a new domain:

Your new domain will then be added. Now add appropriate A, CNAME and MX records to your domain like how you would customise your DNS zone.

2. Add EveryDNS's Name Servers

After you have set up your domain, add EveryDNS's name servers as NS records to your domains. EveryDNS's name servers are ns1.everydns.net, ns2.everydns.net, ns3.everydns.net and ns4.everydns.net -- add them as NS records, and you should get the following zone records:

Your domain should now have 8 NS records, half of them belonging to EditDNS, and half of them belonging to EveryDNS.

3. Enable AXFR Transfer

In order to let EveryDNS do zone transfer from EditDNS, you need to change the "AXFR Transfer" setting. Click on "Change", and put in the value 64.158.219.3.

That IP address is where EveryDNS will initiate the transfer.

4. Set up Secondary Name Servers at EveryDNS

Now go to EveryDNS, create an account if you haven't, and try to add a new domain. Make sure the radio box "Make domain secondary" has been checked, and use ns1.editdns.net as master name server.

Note that EveryDNS will not try to poll the primary DNS, EditDNS in this case, straight away. Usually it takes at most one hour before AXFR is taken place, and the secondary synchronised with the primary.

5. Set up Name Servers at Domain Registrar

The last step involves changing the list of name servers at your domain registrar. All all NS from EditDNS and EveryDNS onto the list. I use NameCheap for this domain.

Save, and all done! It might take a while for the changes to propagate. But now you have 8 name servers over 2 different providers serving your domain. If one goes down, the other stays alive and will continue to resolve your domain name for all your visitors.