Using PressDNS™

PressDNS™ is our DNS system backed by Amazon’s Route53 service. Not only does it provide rock-solid reliability and blazing speed, but it also ensures consistent and highly reliable routing to your application. With the capabilities of Route53, PressDNS leverages advanced features to handle load balancing and geo-routing for your website and CDN traffic. These are complicated records Pagely is able to define for you automatically.

You can take your routing and performance further by using PressDNS in tandem with Pagely’s Mercury Dynamic Site Acceleration to deliver your content globally across 220 points of presence!

Changing Your Domain’s Nameservers

Important: Before pointing to Pagely nameservers, make sure you've recreated your DNS records in your PressDNS zone. You can manage your DNS zone from within Atomic to set up the records you need, such as MX and TXT records, or any custom subdomains.

To use PressDNS, you’ll need to point your nameservers to the correct location. To put it simply, your nameservers say where to find your DNS records. Here’s how to find your nameservers:

Finding Your Nameservers

1. Log into the Atomic control panel.
2. On the left side menu, click on DNS.
   
   
3. If you already have a DNS zone listed for your domain, you can skip this step. If not, locate the Add a Zone section, select your domain, and click the New Zone button to add a new DNS zone.
   
   
4. You should now see your DNS zone for your domain that you want to point. Click on the domain to manage that DNS zone.
   
   
5. Inside the DNS Records section, you’ll see a few DNS records. Locate the value for your NS record. That’s what you’ll use for your nameservers at your domain registrar.

Pointing Your Domain

To point your domain nameservers, you’ll need to change the record at your domain registrar. You’ll want to check their documentation or contact their support for more information on changing nameservers at your domain registrar.

Updating DNS Records

To update your DNS records for domains using PressDNS™, take a look at our article on changing DNS records in PressDNS™.

Wait For Propagation

When someone visits your site, their DNS provider (usually their ISP) will read your domain’s DNS records and usually cache it. Depending on their cache policy, it will be stored for a certain period of time before they refresh again.

Due to differing policies across different DNS providers, you might need to wait a few hours for changes to take effect. Usually, it takes place within a couple of hours, but can take up to 48 hours to fully propagate.

If you don't see your changes taking effect, check how long it’s been since you made the change. Chances are, you’ll just need to wait a bit longer for propagation.

For more information, take a look at our article on DNS propagation.

Important Notes

Deleting an App Deletes DNS Zones

Before deleting an app or canceling your account, be sure that you have made prior arrangements for any DNS records that you need. Once your app has been deleted, all PressDNS records that are associated with it will also be removed.

PressDNS Zones Are Unique to One Domain

A PressDNS zone can only be used for the domain it was created for, so you cannot use the same set of nameservers for another domain.

For example, if you have set up example.com as a PressDNS zone, you're given a unique set of name servers. If you'd like like to use another domain, such as new-example.com on your account and would like to point traffic to us, you cannot use the same nameservers assigned to example.com.

DNS Zones Can Only Be Created For Primary Domains

Within PressDNS, DNS records can only be added for an app's primary domain. For example, if example.com is an alias of another app, you will not be able to create a PressDNS zone for example.com.

If you need to add additional DNS records to a domain that's not the primary domain on the app, we recommend using a 3rd-party DNS service like Cloudflare to manage that domain's DNS records.