SOA Profiles

Start of Authority (SOA) records determine your domain’s time-based settings. These settings include the Refresh, Retry, Expire, and Time to Live values for server functions. SOA Profiles permit you to create SOA records and apply them to one (or more) of your domains.

The default SOA settings are usually appropriate

The SOA Profiles feature has been created to provide you with maximum control over your domain. However, in most cases, the default SOA settings are ideal. In order to maintain maximum stability for your domain, we suggest that you do not modify the default settings for SOA Profiles unless you have a compelling reason to do so.

What are the benefits of SOA Profiles?

Let's say you need to update an SOA value for 10 of your domains and all 10 domains use the same SOA profile. The modification process is simple: just update the SOA profile that they share and all 10 domains are updated simultaneously.

What happens when someone performs an nslookup on my domains?

Anyone who conducts an nslookup (name server lookup) regarding one of your domains will retrieve the name server information and the SOA profile fields you specify - except for the Profile Name which is for your use only.

What is the Technical Contact email address?

People conducting nslookups on your domain may wish to clarify information regarding your domain. You can make sure their queries are directed to the proper email address by using the Technical Contact field. Feel free to leave the default address of support@mydomain.com.

What is the Refresh value?

The refresh value informs your secondary server how often it should check for updates to your domain information on the primary server. We strongly recommend the industry standard of 10,800 seconds (three hours).

What is the Retry value?

If your secondary server cannot reach the primary server after the refresh period it will try to update information about the domain again after a period that you set as the retry value. We recommend the industry standard of 3,600 seconds (one hour).

What is the Expire value?

The Expire value sets the duration of time your secondary server continues trying to confirm domain information following an unsuccessful refresh. After the Expire value is reached the secondary server will stop responding. We recommend the expire value of 605,000 seconds (7 days).

What is the Time to Live or ttl value?

The ttl value informs all servers on the Internet how long they should store information about your domain. For example, a name server caches your domain information following a request for a website that uses your domain. Until the ttl value is reached that name server will continue using the information supplied by the first request each time your domain is requested. When your domain is requested after the ttl period the name server will conduct a new query for updated information about your domain. We recommend setting a ttl of 10,800 seconds or 3 hours.