SlickDNS Features

Fast, Easy-to-Use Web Interface

The SlickDNS account management interface has been designed with a single goal in mind: enabling you to manage DNS for your domains as productively as possible. With the SlickDNS web interface you can:

  • View a quick summary of the DNS configuration for all of your domains on a single page
  • Add new DNS records and web alias domains with only one or two clicks
  • Add new servers and new server IP addresses with one click
  • Select a host record’s IP address from a drop-down list of server addresses

Sign up for a free to see for yourself just how easy it is to take control of your DNS.

Website and Server Uptime Monitoring

Given the importance of a website to your online presence, it’s crucial that you have website monitors in place to notify you immediately if your website goes offline. Normally you’d have to pay extra for a third party service for website monitorning, but it’s a free bonus for all paid SlickDNS accounts.

Configure website uptime monitors with just a few clicks from your SlickDNS account. You’ll get an email alert if the website can’t be reached, or the web server returns an error response, and a follow-up email when the monitored website is back online. Similarly if you’ve configured named servers (another unique SlickDNS feature), you can also configure uptime monitors to ping your servers’ IP addresses and alert you if they become inaccessible.

For reliability and redundancy, the SlickDNS monitoring agents run in separate data centers in San Francisco, New York, London and Frankfurt.

Named Server IP Addresses

If you manage websites running on multiple servers, it’s inconvenient to have to look up the IP addresses for those servers whenever you want to make DNS changes for the sites they host.

With SlickDNS you can create named servers, and associate any number of IP addresses with those servers, which then appear in a drop-down list when you create new host records.

Web Alias Domains

Another feature unique to SlickDNS is the automatic management of web alias domains.

It’s best explained by example: If you own the domain example.com, you’ll typically also own similar top-level domains like example.net and example.org to protect your brand on the Internet. Or you might buy special purpose promotional domains such as example-careers.com which would redirect to http://www.example.com/jobs/.

Usually you want related domains to be treated as aliases of the primary domain. With most DNS management systems you need to configure each alias domain separately as an independent domain even though the DNS configuration is identical to the primary domain. But with SlickDNS all you have to do is type in the alias domain name and click a single button and it’s automatically configured as a web alias of the primary domain.

By default the root records of the primary domain are cloned for alias domains, but you can also configure alias domains to be redirected to a URL.

TTL Values for Humans

Quick, how many seconds are there in a day? If you answered 86400, congratulations, you’re probably a DNS veteran. For the rest of us, SlickDNS will also accept TTL values for, well, humans, like “24 hours” or “1 day”. (If you’re old school you can still enter 86400 and it will take that fine too.)

The following TTL values are all accepted in the SlickDNS web interface:

  • 60 seconds: 60, 60s, “60 sec”, “60 seconds”
  • 15 minutes: 15m, “15 min”, “15 minutes”
  • 3 hours: 3h, “3 hr”, “3 hours”
  • 7 days: 7d, “7 days”

It may seem like a little thing, but we think it makes the SlickDNS interface a lot more humane. After all, why not let the computers do the arithmetic?

Fast Name Server Updates

Some DNS hosting providers only update their name servers every 15 minutes. But the SlickDNS name servers are updated as soon as you make record changes to any of your domains. On average all of the SlickDNS name servers are updated from the master database in under 15 seconds.

Security and Reliability

All pages on the SlickDNS website are encrypted using industry standard SSL/TLS strong encryption. Similarly all updates of the SlickDNS name servers are done via encrypted connections.

For performance and reliability the SlickDNS name servers are anycast routed and located in multiple data centers across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.