Anyone experienced with using cPanel API to provide customers with DNS Hosting?

[speedpacket]

Hi,

As part of our new website, we are looking to start offering our clients free DNS hosting with their domain names. We have quite some options for this, but are unsure which to go for...

We could sign up for a reseller plan with guys such as zoneedit.com, or others that are in the market. We could also set up a cluster which is serving from myDNS.

The most logical option for us however, would be to use the DNS servers we are already running as part of the cluster we set up for our DNS hosting.

Basically, we can easily add DNS zones and manage records using the API which has been enhanced with the release of 11.25.

I was just wondering however if anyone had experience in doing so.

I for one am a bit afraid that it might get tricky when we have a DNS zone for the domain name, the customer late on decides to add hosting, and the createAccount may screw things up for the already existing zone.

Is there anyone online that had some insight on this, or has already experienced with this kind of setup?

We would be writing the service anyhow as we want to provide hosting customers with the ability to manage their DNS as well, so if this would have proven to work with others on the board, it would be an option we were to look into.

thanks so much for the much appreciated feedback!


David.

[mikelegg]

We offer a DNS/sMX Only plan and when we set them up we create a proper cPanel account (with very limited features). So if the account is ever upgraded to a full hosting account there are no problems with zone files being lost etc.

[speedpacket]

What you supposed was indeed an alternative way. However - we plan on targetting the domain name reseller market with the new website as well, meaning it will need to be heavily automated.

I'm not so sure still if this is the way to go, as we may end up with 15.000+ accounts just to host a dns zone...

True, we could set it up on a seperate server which feeds the main DNS'es, but I'm still unsure whether this is the way to go.

Perhaps we should be looking into a whitelabel supplier where we can sign up with as a reseller and who is offering our nameservers to be used, so we can move them when and if we want to

Does anyone else have any ideas?