Most small teams have never audited their own DNS. Then a registrar "security update" or an expired glue record takes their mail and their site down on a Friday.
The 5-minute nameserver audit
-
dig NS yourdomain.com +short— compare against what your DNS provider actually says. -
dig SOA yourdomain.com +short— check the primary NS and the admin contact email are real and current. - Check glue records for any nameserver inside your own domain (e.g.
ns1.yourdomain.com) — these expire separately from the domain and are the classic silent killer. - Set a calendar reminder 60 days before domain expiry. Auto-renew alone fails when the card expires.
Do this quarterly across every client domain. It is the cheapest outage prevention that exists.
Two more free checks that catch 80% of small-team problems:
- Run
dig MXand confirm the target hosts still resolve (decommissioned mail servers are everywhere). - Confirm SPF/DMARC records exist — missing DMARC means spoofed "CEO" emails land in inboxes.
Practical runbooks and checklists for small IT/MSP teams:
- Free incident quick-start: https://hive80lab.gumroad.com/l/ops-starter-kit-free
- Ops Starter Kit (full runbook set): https://hive80lab.gumroad.com/l/ops-starter-kit
- Free ops notes library (167 notes): https://hive80-lab.github.io/ops-notes/
Hive80 Lab — practical ops, automation and security resources for small teams.
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