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Fastly DNS is our authoritative DNS service that leverages Fastly's global, high-performance edge network to serve DNS query responses.

How Fastly DNS works

The domain name system (DNS) translates human-readable domain names (e.g., www.example.com) to machine-readable IP addresses (e.g., 192.102.001.128). Sometimes called the “phone book for the internet,” DNS is a foundational part of the web. Without it, you would have to remember the IP address for any website you wanted to visit. When you enter an address into your web browser, a series of DNS resolution queries occurs, where different DNS servers look up the corresponding IP address for the request you entered and communicate it back.

Generally, there are two types of DNS servers. Recursive resolvers handle DNS resolution queries (DNS lookups) from clients like desktop computers, web browsers, and mobile devices. Through a series of lookups, these resolvers help connect you to the IP address for the domain name you entered. Authoritative servers, like Fastly DNS, ultimately answer with the authoritative mapping of domain name to IP address.

Fastly DNS supports the primary-secondary DNS architecture, which requires you to store and manage your primary “source of truth” DNS records elsewhere. By adding DNS zones, you configure your primary DNS service to add Fastly as a secondary provider. Once delegated at your domain name registrar, Fastly DNS can serve your domains' authoritative responses.

How to use Fastly DNS

To use Fastly DNS:

1. Review the prerequisites and considerations.
2. Reach out to support@fastly.com so we can review your DNS configuration and determine that Fastly DNS can support it.
3. Add Fastly DNS as a secondary DNS provider in your primary DNS configuration.
4. Delegate the Fastly DNS name server names (addresses) to your domain names' registrar configuration to complete setup so Fastly DNS can serve authoritative responses.

Prerequisites and considerations

Keep in mind the following prerequisites and considerations about Fastly DNS:

• Fastly DNS is in Beta and is not suitable for use as a production DNS service. Our Beta phase is designed for testing and collecting feedback from users.
• Fastly DNS is not a primary DNS service. You must store and manage your primary DNS records outside Fastly. Whichever service you use must support zone transfers (AXFR) in order to sync records with Fastly.
• To use Fastly DNS, you must have access to the Domain management page. If you created your account before September 16, 2025 and don't have access to this page, contact support@fastly.com to gain access to this page.
• In line with security best practices, Fastly recommends using TSIG (Transaction Signature) keys for cryptographically securing zone transfers.
• DNSSEC and non-standard record types (like ALIAS or CNAME flattening) are not supported.
• Incremental zone transfers (IXFR) are not supported.
• IPv6 is supported for DNS query resolution, but not for zone transfers.