What Is an SOA Record and What Does It Control?

An SOA (Start of Authority) record is a DNS record that every domain has automatically. It doesn't point your domain anywhere, instead it tells other DNS servers on the internet who is authoritative for your domain's DNS zone and how often they should check it for updates.

You'll rarely need to edit this record yourself, but understanding it helps when you're troubleshooting DNS propagation delays or trying to work out why a change is taking longer than expected to show up.

What information does an SOA record contain?

An SOA record is made up of several fields, all describing how your domain's DNS zone behaves:

• Primary nameserver: the main nameserver that holds the master copy of your domain's DNS zone.
• Admin email: a contact address for the zone, written with a dot instead of the usual @ symbol (e.g. hostmaster.yourdomain.com instead of hostmaster@yourdomain.com).
• Serial number: a number that increases every time the zone changes. Secondary nameservers compare this number to know whether they need to refresh their copy.
• Refresh interval: how often secondary nameservers should check the primary for updates.
• Retry interval: how long a secondary nameserver waits before trying again if a refresh attempt fails.
• Expire time: how long a secondary nameserver keeps serving your zone from its cache if it can't reach the primary at all.
• Minimum TTL: how long other DNS servers should cache a "this record doesn't exist" response for your domain.

You generally don't need to change your SOA record. It's created and managed automatically, and editing it incorrectly can cause DNS lookups for your domain to behave unpredictably. If you're trying to speed up how quickly a DNS change appears everywhere, lowering the TTL on the specific record you're changing (an A or CNAME record, for example) is usually what you actually want.

How to view your SOA record

If you want to check the current values, here's where to find them.

In cPanel

1. Log in to cPanel.
2. Open the Zone Editor tool under the Domains section.
3. Click Manage next to the domain you want to check.
4. Look for the record with type SOA in the list. Click Edit if you need to view the individual fields.

In DirectAdmin

1. Log in to DirectAdmin.
2. Open DNS Management under the Account Manager or Domain section.
3. Select the domain you want to check.
4. The SOA entry is listed at the top of the DNS records table, along with its serial number and interval values.

If you're moving your website to a new host and want DNS changes to take effect faster, see What Is DNS TTL and How Do You Lower It Before Moving Your Website?