I use namecheap as well and have one complaint. They don't allow you to specify the order of your nameservers! Regardless of the order you input your name servers the primary, secondary, tertiary nameservers will be assigned randomly with no way to specify the order. I sent a support request to namecheap and got the following response. Grrrr
Hello,
It does not matter which order they are listed, because when the nameservers are queried, they are queried simultaneously, and the first one to answer is assigned by the Registry to that particular query as "primary" at that point in time.
What this means is that regardless of how they are listed, the order of the listing does not determine which nameserver is queried first.
The order that the nameserves appear in the Registry is not up to the Registrar, and cannot be changed by the Registrar.
This is not what the folks at Engine Yard told me. Between namecheap and Engine Yard I have more faith in Engine Yard's expertise though based on the moding of my comment and dcurtis's comment it looks like namecheap was the correct one here.
Snippet from a support email from Engine Yard regarding my questions of how important the order was since namecheap wouldn't let me specify an order per Engine Yard's instructions:
In the words of one of our engineers, it's importantish ;-)
Essentially d.ns.engineyard.com is the local primary, b.ns.engineyard.com is an offsite backup and e.ns.engineyard is a local backup. If you can't put them in that order don't worry to much about it, but if you can make d first that is preferable.
Comments
I use namecheap as well and have one complaint. They don't allow you to specify the order of your nameservers! Regardless of the order you input your name servers the primary, secondary, tertiary nameservers will be assigned randomly with no way to specify the order. I sent a support request to namecheap and got the following response. Grrrr
Hello,
It does not matter which order they are listed, because when the nameservers are queried, they are queried simultaneously, and the first one to answer is assigned by the Registry to that particular query as "primary" at that point in time.
What this means is that regardless of how they are listed, the order of the listing does not determine which nameserver is queried first.
The order that the nameserves appear in the Registry is not up to the Registrar, and cannot be changed by the Registrar.
This is how DNS works. It has nothing to do with NameCheap.
This is not what the folks at Engine Yard told me. Between namecheap and Engine Yard I have more faith in Engine Yard's expertise though based on the moding of my comment and dcurtis's comment it looks like namecheap was the correct one here.
Snippet from a support email from Engine Yard regarding my questions of how important the order was since namecheap wouldn't let me specify an order per Engine Yard's instructions:
In the words of one of our engineers, it's importantish ;-)
Essentially d.ns.engineyard.com is the local primary, b.ns.engineyard.com is an offsite backup and e.ns.engineyard is a local backup. If you can't put them in that order don't worry to much about it, but if you can make d first that is preferable.