Primary DNS Zone is one of the essential parts when it comes to managing your domain name. Let’s break it down and explain a little bit more about it.

DNS – meaning 

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical system. It helps with managing data correlated with Internet domain names. For humans is easier to memorize domain names rather than numbers. So DNS is making things simple, and one of its main tasks is also known as name resolution. That is the assignment of domain names to IP addresses. The Domain Name System is essential and one of the bases of the technical structure of the Internet.

On the technical side, the DNS is a network of nameservers. The connection between nameservers and domain names is, in other words explaining where the data is really located. Therefore, it is important to understand the concept of the DNS zone.

Why do you need a Primary (Master) DNS zone?

DNS Zone explained.

The DNS server you are using can hold numerous zones to manage the DNS namespace more appropriately. The DNS zone is a segment or region of that namespace. It is applied as an organizational section to achieve more control over some DNS elements, like authoritative namespaces.

If you want to have a domain that operates properly, you have to point it to several servers, such as web servers, mail servers, and so on. This can be accomplished by creating various types of DNS records in the DNS zone.

The DNS zone is the place where all DNS records are stored. Also, it is the one piece that is responsible for the existence of the Domain Name System (DNS).

For example, a DNS zone can be relevant for .com, example.com, info.example.com, and so on. Although if we inspect a subdomain as a website on its own, that will require dedicated administration. Therefore the subdomain will need a separate zone.

The DNS zone contains information about the DNS records, DNS zone administrative contact, and zone parameters like Refresh and Retry rate. The last two are defined in the SOA (Start of Authority) record. 

What is a Primary DNS Zone?

The Primary DNS Zone is also known as a Master DNS Zone. It is that specific part of the namespace that is in your control. There you can remove and add DNS records and manage your domain name in precisely the way you want. Every part of the domain, meaning every host you want to manage, could be a separate Primary DNS Zone if you’re going to administrate it. Also, a domain name is able to operate with only one Primary DNS Zone.

This DNS zone is the place where your zone file is. On the other hand, the zone file is the text document that includes the whole packet of DNS records for your domain name.

The Primary DNS Zone allows read and write, and it is placed inside a Master (Primary) authoritative nameserver. 

If you want to provide better availability, security, and overall redundancy, you can consider implementing Secondary DNS Zones. They are read-only copies of the original Primary DNS Zone, and they are located in Secondary DNS servers.

Conclusion.

Having a more precise understanding of DNS infrastructure purpose and the components, it is constructed with will be helpful for you to manage it more effortlessly.