Quoting Andrew McGlashan (andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au):
Given that I manage a number of my own domains and a bunch of others that I manage rely upon my name servers, I will put in place a third authoritative name server at some stage, hopefully fairly soon too.
It wont hurt, but as I've got so many domains to manage, I won't palm this off to anyone, I'll handle it myself on a friend's machine (I manage his servers anyway). He has always said that I could put a name server there, but I never thought it was necessary, nor useful enough to worry about.
This is the sort of thing I do, with a small circle of friends: We all run authoritative nameservers, and each do secondary for each other. I can offer one somewhat amusing cautionary tale, on a theme of 'people are flaky, and need to be checked up on'. The underlying assumption of mutual secondary nameservice for friends is that each will do the bare minimum to avoid screwing up, if only out of Golden Rule concerns. After all, after initial setup, there's zero work to do. Secondaries just track what the primary does. Should be pretty foolproof, right? Into this idyllic picture steps the Pacific Coast beach town of Santa Cruz, California, across the Santa Cruz Mountains from Silicon Valley and about 150 km south of San Francisco. Santa Cruz is a hippie haven, long home of many fundamentally flaky people, with a laid-back demeanour at sharp odds with Silicon Valley's work ethic. Santa Cruz is best known for its beach-side amusement park and for surfing. I'm told I rankle some Santa Cruzans with my brisk manner and binary logic. 'It's a local motion issue', a friend helpfully explained. Around 2000, a young man named Jacob Hunter launched a Santa Cruz LUG with the wince-worthy name Santa [C]ruz Microsoft-Alternative User Group or SMAUG. (Great, now we're defining ourselves in reference to Microsoft?) Santa Cruzans liked the whimsy and whiff of fantasy. A number of us from VA Linux Systems would occasionally drive over the mountains to help Jacob. Jacob had not bothered to ensure that a suitable Internet domain was available before naming his group. After flailing around a bit, he registered scruz.org . A Linux-oriented business owner in Colorado with the glorious name of Crawford Rainwater underwrote the domain registration. I and five other volunteers stepped forward to do authoritative nameservice, with my ns1.linuxmafia.com serving as master. It all tested well, and we rested in the knowledge that the infrastructure had massive redundancy. Roll forward a couple of years. Cue 'uh-oh' music. One day during a winter storm, my house (where ns1.linuxmafia.com lives) had a few hours without electrical power. When service was restored, I found several people complaining that scruz.org had been completely unresolvable. The period of outage corresponded suspiciously to my house's power outage. Moreover, one of the people complaining most bitterly, and suggesting it was somehow all my fault, was the operator of one of the DNS secondaries for the domain. I smelled a rodent.... After some work using whois and dig, and a couple of telephone calls, I uncovered the full picture. Over those couple of years since domain setups: o Two of the Santa Cruzans had re-IPed their nameservers, and not bothered to inform the master. o Another of the Santa Cruzans had retired his nameserver, and not bothered to inform the master. o Another of the Santa Cruzans' nameservers was working but he'd unilaterally decided to cease serving the scruz.org domain, and not bothered to inform the master. o The fifth secondary operator could no longer be contacted, and both he and his nameserver had simply vanished. The domain showed as having six auth nameservers, but de-facto, after flaky admin defections, it had eroded to one -- thus dropping off the Net during my power outage. I explained said debacle to the assembled (who doubtless assumed I was just being mean, and needed more surfboard time), then fixed the nameservice -- and created weekly cron jobs such as the one I recently posted here to check DNS particulars rather than trusting to friends to not be flaky. SMAUG limped along for a few more years and then collapsed because the Santa Cruzans couldn't be bothered to keep it running.