Table of Contents
Setting up Gandi's DNS servers before your transfer
In some instances you may need to change to Gandi's DNS during a transfer. To avoid downtime, it is possible to preconfigure our DNS for your domain name.
To do this:
1. Create a new zone
From your Gandi account, click on the “DNS Zones” button
Then, on the “Your DNS zones” page, click on the blue “Create a zone” button on the bottom right-hand of the page. You will then be asked to Create a new zone and to choose a name for it:
For the sake of this guide, I'll call it “My new Gandi zone”, but you can give it any name you want.
Once you submit, then Gandi's zone file edit interface appears, with the Version 2 of the new zone ready to be edited (see how to edit your zone file).
All you need to do now is to set up your zone file to match the values that you obtain from your current DNS provider.
2. Launch your domain name transfer
You now can simply launch your transfer (see how here).
When you get to the “Choose your DNS” page, check the button that says “Zone file selection”, click on “Edit”, and then choose from the dropdown menu the zone file that you want to use. Remember, here I made a zone called, “My new Gandi zone”, for this transfer, and so I'm going to choose this.
That's it!
Also, Gandi updates zone files following transfer only every few minutes (20 minutes as of this writing). It's possible that you will not get an answer for your domain from Gandi's DNS for up to 20 minutes after your transfer completes. Operationally, you should plan for this potential for a short downtime, though generally DNS caches are longer than this window, so it often will not matter.
