2. How do I get started? What nameservers do I use?

Here's a simple step by step set of instructions on how to get started:
   - you must buy or already own a domain name from a registrar
   - sign up for the service using complete information
   - you will get your password via email in about 1 hour
   - log in to your account and click "add zones"
   - enter the domain name that you want DNS services for and click "add"
   - a pair of nameservers will be assigned to you
   - contact your registrar and tell them to change the nameservers for your domain
   - wait 3 days for the change to take place

3. Why are you called "DNSBankoi"?

In DNS terminology, a domain name is a single entry, like "www.mydomain.com" or just "mydomain.com". A "Zone" is a collection of one or more domain names, all having the same ending. For example, "mydomain.com" is a zone that contains "mydomain.com", "www.mydomain.com", and "mail.mydomain.com". Another example of a zone is ".com", which contains all domains that end in ".com". When you sign up for DNSBankoi service, you are able to edit the DNS entries that are within your "Zone". Hence, "DNSBankoi".

4. What are Bankoit's policies?

Check out our policies page.

5. What are Bankoi's terms of service??

Check out our terms page.

6. How long will the offer for free service last?

The first 5 domains you add to the system are free, as long as these domains do not exceed our bandwidth limits. If a domain is getting a lot of traffic (like a million hits/year) then that zone will stop being free. Reseller accounts are never free. Zones which use backup mailservice, or tertiary DNS are also not free.

You can always cancel within 30 days after receiving a billing notice - with no obligation to pay.

We currently have no plans to change this offer.

For the complete details, read our pricing schedule, and, for our official policies, read our policies page.

7. Why is there a free offer? What does Bankoi get out of it?

Like the proven "shareware" business model, we believe that once you put 5 of your domains on our system, you will enjoy the convenience of our integrated Domain Manager so much that you won't mind paying a nominal fee to expand your usage of our system to include all of your domains.

If you add less than 5 domain names to the system, and your live domains remain below our bandwidth limits, then enjoy using our services free of charge! Don't forget to tell your friends what you think of our service!

8. I would like to offer a service similar to Bankoi to my clients. Is that possible?

We offer a unique service to ISP's, registrars, or anyone else who has clients that would need to manage their domains. Our site is constructed in a way that makes it possible (even easy!) for you to wrap our product in the look and feel of your existing web site, so that you are providing our service to your clients. Your clients do not even need to know about Bankoi -- the service offering is yours, not ours!

9. How can I contact Bankoi?

Check out our contact page.

10. How reliable are Bankoi's servers?

Bankoi runs on top-tier NOCs, with dieselbackup power and multiple fiber lines to backbone providers. We continue to improve our network, ensuring that DNSBankoi is the most robust DNS provider on the Internet.

In the event of a partial outage, the DNS system automatically fails over to another network - without losing a query.

We run monitoring scripts on all of our servers, tracking CPU utilization, traffic, and response time to all services.

If high reliability is a concern, we allow you to pay extra to tier-up the average speed and reliability your service. You do this by adding a 3rd and 4th nameserver to the system. At 4 nameservers, your uptime would be 100%. At 3 nameservers your uptime is 99.9999%, at 2 (standard), the uptime is 99.9%.

11. Where can I get unlimited free DNS?

Granite Canyon is the most well known free DNS provider. They will provide DNS, free of cost, for as many domains as you have. They are a little harder to use, and their servers aren't quite as reliable, but they are a great, completely free DNS solution.

12. Where's the best place to buy inexpensive domain names?

Because Bankoi works closely with many registrars and registration providers, we cannot refer our clients to any particular registrar. You might want to check out Http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Domain_Names/, which is a fairly unbiased list of registration providers.

13. How does your billing system work?

Here's how the billing cycle works:

• When you make a purchase - we add 'zone credits' to your account
• When a domain is added to the system, your account is debited by 1 and the start date is set on the domain
• Just like when you buy a domain name, this debit is permanent unless you delete it within a few days.
• Every time 1 year or 200MB of usage is used (1 million DNS queries), 1 debit is added to your account for the zone
• Extra (third, fourth) nameservers hosted by Bankoi cost an extra 'zone credit' (1) per year
• Failover monitor service costs an extra 'zone credit' (1) per year
• Backup mail service also costs an extra 'zone credit' (1) per year
• When the number of debits exceeds the number of credits in your account, we will send a reminder notice to the billing contact listed on your account.
• After 30 days we will send several warning messages to both contacts listed.
• We will never turn off an account until 30 days have passed after we have sent warning messages

*FREE accounts are ones where the usage is less than 200MB per domain, and there have been fewer than 5 domains added to the account, and no premium services have been used. Only the first 5 domain names added to your account are free.

14. How much are your services? Are there any limits to what you provide?

The pricing structure is:

 

* You only get debited when you add a zone to the system. Unused credits never expire. Usage that counts towards your quota includes bytes transferred during DNS queries, delivery of parked home pages, delivery of URL forwarding information, and delivery of forwarded e-mails. If you do not use WebPark, WebForward and MailForward, then only DNS queries will count towards your total usage.

For example if a single domain goes over 200 MB of transfer during a year, then it counts as TWO domains, if it goes over 400MB, then it counts as three, etc. Usually DNS hits are cached, so even the busiest sites won't go over the 200 MB limit. 200 MB should get you about 1,000,000 DNS queries. A typical site uses 5 MB per year of DNS bandwidth.

There is no limit to the number of subdomains or records that your zone may contain.
If you go over your credit limits, we will send a billing notice. Free users can always cancel their account without obligation after receiving a billing notice.

15. I lost my password! Can I get it sent to me?

In addition to your email address, you have to remember either a) Your Name or b) One of the domains your are editing. To fill out the lost-password form. A new password will be sent to your email address, or the we will make a phone call to the number we have on file, if your email is not available.

If both your email and your phone number have changed, then you need to:

    - update the technical contact info for all the domain names in your account with a working email address
    - email us and tell us that you lost your password, and you want us to send it to the contact info from your domain names
 

This manual process can take many days, so it's advisable to ensure that you always have accurate contact info on file with us.

Our security is strict, and we do not make exceptions to these procedures under any circumstances.

16. What is DNS?

DNS is the technology that ties text-based domain names to the numeric IP addresses that are necessary to locate the domain's server on the net.

17. What is Dynamic DNS, and do you offer it?

Dynamic DNS is necessary when the IP address of a server tied to a domain name constantly changes. This is typical when the server connects to the Internet using a modem. In Dynamic DNS, the server contacts the DNS provider each time its IP address changes in order to update the DNS entry for the domain hosted by the server.

18. Where can I learn more about DNS?

• The DNS Resources Directory is an excellent place to start, containing a good list of DNS information.
• ISC BIND is the standard in DNS server software and is distributed for free at isc.org.
• We have compiled a list of DNS RFC's which gives you all of the intricate details about the DNS protocol.
• O'Reilly publishes DNS and Bind, an excellent book, and the industry standard manual for understanding and using DNS.

19. How can I host multiple web sites on one IP Address?

You can set up as many domains as you want pointing to the same IP Address using DNS, just keep adding zones, and setting the IP addresses.

However, you need a web server that uses the 'host' header to route the different domains to different web instances.

• Apache Info: Using name-based Virtual Hosts
• Microsoft IIS Info: Using Host Header Names in IIS

20. My ISP blocked port 80. How can I run a web server?

Don't worry, you can still run one!

1. Sign up and get started with DNSBankoi.
2. Make your web server listen on port number like "6000" or "5000"
3. Check to see if your web server works in a browser by using a URL: http://3.4.5.6:6000/. Use the port number that you're listening on and the real IP address of your machine.
4. Add the "IP Address" for your web server in DNSBankoi: "ww2.domainname.com" points to "ip address".
5. Add a Web Forward entry for your domain called "www.domainname.com" that points to http://ww2.domainname:6000/

We recommend turning cloaking off in this case, letting people know thay are going to http://ww2.domainname.com:6000 is usually OK, and it allows the browser to perform better.

21. How can I check to see if DNS is working?

A frequent mistake is to use "ping" to test DNS. On Windows NT/2K and Unix, there are tools called "nslookup" and "dig".

- Before you contact ZoneEdit, you can check to see whether or not your registrar is pointing your domain to the correct nameservers. The "whois" information is often wrong, and should not be used. Go to a command prompt/console and enter the command:

nslookup -type=NS yourdomainname.com
If the response does not contain all of the correct name servers, then you should contact your registrar and have them fix it.

- To check to see whether a particular server is responding, you can add the server name:

nslookup www.yourdomainname.com ns1.zoneedit.com
If the response has a bunch of 'root-servers' that means the server does not know about the domain name and is referring you elsewhere.

- To look for a certain record type, like the "MX" record or the "SOA" record, you can use the parameter "-type=MX" or "-type=SOA".

nslookup -type=MX yourdomainname.com

- If you don't have access to "nslookup" or "dig", you can use our online DNS lookup tool instead. It works for all domain names - not just zoneedit ones.

22. I set up an MX record and my mail doesn't work, why?

The most common mistake is to set up an MX record, without setting up an IP address for the mail host. (IE: mail.example.com is an MX record for example.com, but has no IP address) Our system tries to alert you to this before it happens.
Another very frequent mistake is to point an MX record to a mail server that doesn't route mail for the domain yet, or keeps a separate user database for each destination domain.
Before reaching the conclusion that DNS is responsible for your mail routing issues, it's a good idea to test your mail server, independently of the DNS.
You can use our SMTP Test Utility to test a mail server, even if MX records aren't set up at all.

23. How can I backup/download my zone files?

If you want to back up all DNSBankoi DNS data for a given zone, use named-xfer:

named-xfer -z atreju.com -f atreju.com.txt ns1.dnsbankoi.com.

On unix, "named-xfer" comes with most distributions, and it's easy to schedule a daily backup with cron.

On Windows, we like to use the ISC standard named-xfer tool.

24. What's your favorite movie?

Right now, ours is Bowling for Columbine. The conclusions may be ambiguous, but that's precisely what makes this characterization of U.S. culture so believable. The movie left us with an uncharacteristic feeling of hope for the future of our country.

25. What's the best way to stop spam?

Right now, the best is K9 by Romin Keir. It's free (but we donated), it doesn't crash, it's easy to use, and it's ridiculously small and fast. We tested several others, including some plugins for our mail reader, and they were so bad that we nearly gave up hope. We get over 2000 spam emails each day. After only 4 days of training, K9 blocked 99.5% of our considerable spam, without blocking legitimate mail.

26. What can I control via the Domain Manager?

If you have an ISP that will serve your domain, you can assign "A" records so that visitors to your web site will connect to the web server that your ISP has assigned to you, and "MX" records so people who send you e-mail will connect to your ISP's mail server.

If you aren't using an ISP for your domain, you can tell our servers to park your domain on the web with a "Coming Soon!" introductory web page. Also, you can redirect visitors at your domain's web page to any other web page of your choosing, using a WebForward. You can additionally create MailForwards that will allow you to receive any e-mail directed at your domain in the mailbox at your ISP, or any free mailbox, like hotmail, yahoo, etc.

27. What is an "A" record?

An "A" record, also called an "address" record, ties a domain name to an IP address. If there is a server on the Internet that is configured to handle traffic for this domain, you can enter the name of the domain and the IP address of the server, and almost immediately, anyone surfing to that domain connects to the correct server.

28. What is an "MX" record?

"MX" ("Mail eXchanger") records are used to specify what server on the Internet is running e-mail software that is configured to handle e-mail for your domain. If you want your ISP to handle routing the e-mail for your domain to you, you need to specify the domain name or IP address of your ISP's mail server. In addition, you can specify the rank of each mail server when you have more than one. Make sure your ISP knows that you're using their servers to route your domain's email, or all your e-mail will "return to sender"!

If you want to use our servers instead of your ISP's, don't specify any "MX" records, just configure our simple MailForward service!

29. What is a "CNAME" record?

"CNAME" records, short for "Canonical Name", create an alias from a domain name to another. You could create an alias from "yahoo.mydomain.com" to "www.yahoo.com", and every reference to "yahoo.mydomain.com" would go to the other location, regardless how yahoo changed their IP addresses! Be careful, however; CNAMEs won't work everywhere. If you create an MX record, and the name used for the mail server was defined using a CNAME, you might lose e-mail!

30. What is a WebForward?

A WebForward creates a hidden "A" record pointing to our web server. When our web server gets a request for your site from a visitor, our web server is designed to forward the visitor to the URL of your choosing.

31. What is Cloaking?

Cloaking is a special kind of WebForward. Just like a WebForward, cloaking creates a hidden "A" record pointing to our web server. However, when our web server gets a request for your site from a visitor, not only does our web server forward the visitor to the URL of your choosing, but an invisible frame is used to hide the destination URL. Your domain name stays in the location bar of your visitor's browser, thus "cloaking" the destination URL.

32. What is a MailForward?

A MailForward creates a hidden "MX" record pointing to our email server. When we receive an email on your behalf, our email server is designed to forward the email to the address of your choosing.

Expert tip: If you use "*" for the new email address (or just leave it blank), then all email going to your domain will get sent to the destination address, if it doesn't match another email address you've explicitly specified. Also, specifying the same new email address twice with different destinations will cause a copy of the email to get sent to both destinations!

33. How do I create a default MailForward for my domain?

If you use "*" for the new email address (or just leave it blank), then all email going to your domain will get sent to the destination address, if it doesn't match another email address you've explicitly specified.

34. How do I MailForward the same mailbox to multiple recipients?

Specifying the same new email address twice with different destinations will cause a copy of the email to get sent to both destinations.

35. Does DNSBankoi support round-robin DNS?

We sure do! Simply create 2 "A" records with the same domain name and different IP addresses, and your visitors will be load balanced between the two servers.

36. How do I enable secondary, backup or slave DNS service?

Our secondary DNS servers will pull DNS information from your primaries.

In the Control Panel, on the View Page, click 'Advanced'. On that screen you should see a 'Make Slave Zone' link. Clicking on this link will disable the regular control panel, and will allow you to enter the IP address of the master server.

37. How do I enable backup mail? How does backup mail work?

When you sign up for the backup mail service, we automatically add our backup mail server in an MX record to your zone. This causes all incoming mail to attempt your primary server first, and if that fails, to try our backup server. When our backup server gets mail for you, it looks up your primary server, and periodically attempts to redeliver your mail to the primary. It will attempt redelivery for 10 days before returning the mail to the sender as undeliverable.

38. How can I delete a zone?

On the View page, click on "Advanced", and then click on "Permanently Delete this Zone". The zone is quickly removed from service on our nameservers. We refund usage for deleted domains within 24 hours, only if they are deleted within 30 days and the usage is below 20K, or if they have never been used.

39. How can I delete my account?

Simply remove all of the zones from your account. You account will then expire as 'unused', and you will receive a termination notice. If you are leaving us because of missing features or other issues, please let us know, so we can improve the site. We'd really appreciate it! Send a mail to support@bankoi.com

40. Why can't I have the same domain name in multiple record types?

Because WebForward needs a special "A" record to function correctly. Also, CNAMEs are mutually exclusive of "A" records, since a domain name can't be both an IP address AND an alias simultaneously.

41. Why can't I delete the "A" record for the root name of my domain?

All domains must have an "A" record for the root of the domain. Believe it or not, omitting this "A" record may prevent some mail servers from delivering your email correctly. WebParking or WebForwarding the root of your domain is sufficient, because both of these create hidden "A" records pointing to our servers.

If you're really looking to delete this record, try changing the IP address to "0.0.0.0" instead, it's functionally equivalent.

42. How many records can I create for my domain name?

As many as you want!

43. How does your failover service work?

Failover monitoring service works when you have two or more web servers running the same (or similar) web site.

• First, you need the IP address for your domain, and get it working - then you add the failover monitor.
• The failover monitor watches your web server(s) by hitting a URL you specify and looking for text in the results.
• When the system detects that one of them is having an error, and the others aren't, it pulls the IP address out of the list.
• If none of the IP's are responding and you have a failure IP/URL defined, then it points the site to the failure IP/URL.
• If the system can't get to all of the IP's then it assumes that the fault is it's own connection - and it takes no action.
• If any of your IP's come back online they are restored

This effectively and safely keeps your site online - even if one of your web servers is down.

The average failure detection time is 5 minutes. This time varies depending on the speed of your site and the nature of the failure. Recovery times are faster, averaging 3 minutes.

44. How do I set up reverse DNS?

If you have an entire class C netblock, and your ISP will delegate reverse DNS to zoneedit, then you can do the following:

• First, you need to add the ARPA zone to the zoneedit system (example: 3.2.1.in-addr.arpa.)
• Then you need to tell your ISP (or ARIN) to delegate control over that zone to the nameservers assigned to you
• For these sorts of zones, there's no need to add A records, only PTR records are needed.
• Example of a PTR: 4.3.2.1.in-addr.arpa. IN PTR www.mysite.com

We also can support CNAMEs to serve PTR records from our servers, so you can control less than a whole netblock

You should not delegate a single IP address using NS records. This may work, but it will be unreliable.

Reverse DNS is hard, especially because of the preponderance of virtual web servers. 9 times out of 10, you should simply get your ISP to set up a reverse DNS record for you, rather than trying to get a CNAME or an NS delegation.

Reverse DNS is not required for the correct operation of web servers and most other internet systems.