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I have just purchased a domain name, however now I realise dns hosting was not free and I have to pay extra to set an MX, CNAME or A record.
Do I have to do this with the same company I registered my domain with or can I do this with someone who offers this service at a lower cost?
You might check out ZoneEdit - I believe their DNS hosting services can be had for free/cheap.
You don't have to do this with the domain registrar, you can use any DNS server in the world.
Also, most hosting companies give you free DNS services (I suppose you are hosting your site at some hosting company and not at your home).
domain name registration is just that... registration of the domain name. As you've just found out, now you have to get your services hosted (web, email, ftp, etc, etc) and DNS setup so that people can actually reach those services.
The easiest (and sometimes cheapest) thing to do is have them all done at the same place, but for a variety of reasons (not being cheapest is one) you may not want to do that.
So to answer your question, YES, you can have your DNS hosted elsewhere. Usually hosting companies will do the DNS as well, so that's probably your best bet and they can guide you through it if you don't know how.
If you are are hosting your own server (in your house for example), then just DNS service is all you need, although I would think your registrar would do that for you without added cost?
Those servers will run a DNS software (probably BIND) as authoritative servers, which means that if one has no access to a check query in a local DNS, it will ultimately query one of those servers. On those servers, the DNS service must have what is known as a ZONE file. The zone file will host the static information about your hosts of your domain. You can have different types of records, such as NS, A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, etc. You will usually designate one of the two servers as a slave of the other, in a master-slave relationship. This only means that the master is the server that will be copied on to the slave. The master or slave "flag" is part of the configuration file for the NDS software. If you are going to run your own, you will have to play with all those pieces of configuration. Otherwise, if it is configured elsewhere, they will take care of this for you.
DynDNS can host a custom domain such as your, for a low annual cost, and will provide the second server, with the redundancy that you need.
What provider are you using? If you don't care that much about it, you could initiate a transfer (free) to a better registrar such as GoDaddy or the like which will give you the DNS control you want.
