Both are editable, both have sane defaults, and neither needs touching for most zones. The one exception is worth knowing.
TTL — the number that decides how fast a change lands
TTL is how long a resolver may keep an answer before asking again. It is set per record.
- A high TTL (say 86400, a day) means fewer queries and a faster average lookup — and it means a change takes up to a day to be seen everywhere.
- A low TTL (say 300, five minutes) means changes land quickly and resolvers ask more often.
Plan around it. If you know you are moving a server next Tuesday, drop the TTL on the affected records to 300 the day before. Make the change, confirm it, then put the TTL back up. Lowering it on the day does nothing — resolvers are already holding the old value for the old duration.
The SOA record
The SOA carries the zone's own timers. They matter for how our nameservers behave among themselves and for how resolvers treat failures.
- Refresh, retry, expire — how secondary servers behave when they cannot reach the primary. Defaults are fine unless you have a reason.
- Negative caching TTL — how long a resolver may remember that a name does not exist. This is the one people get caught by: create a record that used to be missing and the "no such name" answer can still be cached. If you are about to add a name that people have already been trying, lower this first.
Serial numbers
The SOA serial increments on every change, automatically. You do not need to manage it, and it is the reason a version history exists at all — see Time Machine.
Last reviewed 2026-08-19.
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