Managing zones

A zone is one domain. Everything else in the portal hangs off it.

Adding

Add the domain name on its own — example.com. The zone is created with its SOA and NS records already in place.

Your plan caps how many zones you may hold. Reaching the cap refuses the next one rather than charging for it.

Pausing a zone

Pause takes a domain off our nameservers without deleting anything. Open the zone and use Pause zone, in the row of tools beside Transfer and Delete.

While paused:

• the zone is removed from all four nameservers and answers nothing;
• every record is kept, exactly as it was;
• Unpause puts it back, complete, whenever you like. It is your switch and

you can use it as often as you need.

It is useful for a domain you are decommissioning and want to test the effect of before removing, or one you want off the internet for a while. It is not a way to pause billing — a paused zone still counts against your plan, because it is still yours and still stored.

It does not take effect everywhere at once

This is the part that surprises people, in both directions.

When you pause, resolvers around the world keep answering from their own cache until those answers expire. The domain may keep working for some visitors for up to the TTL you had set — often an hour, sometimes 24. Nothing is wrong; the pause worked and the internet has not caught up.

When you unpause, the reverse. Resolvers that cached the failure keep returning it until that expires, so the domain can look dead for a while after you switch it back on.

If you know a pause is coming, lowering the TTL on the records a day beforehand shortens both halves.

A pause stays a pause

Once the zone is off our nameservers it stays off until you unpause it. Nothing on our side puts it back — not a scheduled job, not a sync, not a health check. The only thing that republishes a paused zone is you pressing Unpause.

If you paused a zone on or before 29 August 2026 and found it answering again later that day, that was a fault in our scheduled maintenance rather than anything you did. It was fixed on 30 August 2026. A pause set now holds.

You can keep working on a paused zone

Adding, editing and deleting records all still work. Nothing you do reaches the internet while the zone is paused — the changes are held in the portal, and the whole zone is published, exactly as you left it, when you unpause.

Every save reminds you: you will see "This zone is paused, so the change is saved here but not live. It will be published to all nameservers when you unpause the zone." So there is no way to change a paused zone and quietly believe it went live.

That makes a pause a reasonable way to rework a zone properly: take it offline, change as much as you like without a half-finished state being served, and bring it back in one step.

The record count on your plan still includes a paused zone's records. They are still stored, and still yours.

Paused is not suspended

A pause is yours and you can undo it. A suspension is imposed by us and only we can lift it — see below.

Handing a zone to another account

A zone can be moved to another KumoDNS customer without its DNS being interrupted. Open the zone, choose Transfer owner, and enter their email address. You can add a note explaining what it is.

Nothing happens until they accept. The zone stays yours, answering exactly as before, and it still counts against your plan. When they accept it becomes theirs — they own, edit and are billed for it — and it counts against their plan's zone limit from that moment. DNS is not interrupted at any point.

The offer expires after seven days. If they never answer, it closes on its own and the zone stays with you.

Both of you are kept informed:

• the person receiving it sees it on their dashboard the next time they sign in,

with the full explanation and Accept or Decline in the same place;

• you are told the outcome — accepted, declined, or expired unanswered — on your

own dashboard and on the zone.

Those notices are shown once. They are the panel's copy of something we also emailed you when it happened; that email is the record to keep. If you decline an offer you can say why, and the sender is shown your reason.

You can withdraw an offer at any time before it is answered, from the zone.

⚠️ The plan check happens when they accept, not when you offer. A recipient whose zone allowance filled up in between is told their plan has no room, and the transfer simply does not happen — nothing is lost, and they can make room and accept again while the offer is still open.

⚠️ The link in the invitation email is not a key. It lands on the right offer and does nothing else: every action checks that the signed-in account is the one the offer was made to. Anyone who forwards that email, or reads it over a shoulder, gets a sign-in page and then their own empty list.

What does not travel with the zone: the DNSSEC signing state — if the zone is signed, read moving a signed domain first, because the DS record belongs to whoever controls the domain at the registrar rather than to whoever holds the zone here — along with version history and recycle-bin entries, which belong to the account that made them, and any invoice already issued.

If a zone is suspended

Suspended is not the same as disabled. Disabling is your own switch and you can undo it. A suspension is imposed by us — for an abuse report, a payment problem, or a legal request — and only we can lift it.

While a zone is suspended:

• it is withdrawn from our nameservers and answers nothing, worldwide;
• it cannot be edited — adding and changing records is refused, from the

portal and from the API alike;

• it cannot be transferred to another account, and any transfer offer

already standing on it is cancelled;

• deleting still works, both the zone and its records. Nothing is answering,

so removing something changes nothing anyone can resolve.

The zone list marks it Suspended with a More info link, and the zone's own page says so at the top. Both open the same panel, which carries the reason we recorded and when it happened. If you think it is a mistake, reply to the notice or contact support — there is nothing you can switch back on yourself.

Your records are untouched throughout. Lifting a suspension republishes the zone to every nameserver exactly as it was.

Deleting

Deleting a zone stops it being answered for.

• On a paid plan it goes to the recycle bin and can be restored complete with its records, for the number of days your plan allows.
• On the free plan there is no recycle bin. Deletion is permanent and immediate. The portal tells you this before you confirm.

Either way, delegation is not cleaned up for you. If the domain is still pointed at our nameservers at your registrar, it will now fail to resolve. Move the delegation first if the domain is staying alive somewhere else.

Bulk actions

Zones can be selected and acted on together. Useful when a project ends and thirty domains go at once — and worth the same care, because the confirmation covers the selection rather than each zone.

Notes

Every zone can carry a short internal note. Nobody outside your account sees it. Forty domains named after clients stop being self-explanatory faster than you expect.

Re-syncing

A zone can be pushed to the nameservers again on demand. You should not normally need it — every change publishes on save — but it exists for the case where a server was unreachable during an edit and you want to be certain rather than to assume. See Publishing and sync.

Last reviewed 2026-09-24.