Skip to content
DomainGrade

What we checkDNS hygieneDN-04

SOA timers

The refresh, retry, expire and minimum values in your SOA record should be within normal ranges.

Area
DNS hygiene
Check
DN-04
Included
Free in every scan

What we check

We read your SOA record and check the four timers against conventional bounds. Informational.

Why it matters

Odd values make secondary name servers refresh too often or cache stale answers too long. Neither breaks anything on its own; both are signs of a zone that was hand-edited and never revisited.

They are also a reasonable proxy for how the zone is maintained. A hand-edited SOA that has not been touched since a migration usually sits alongside other records in the same state.

How to fix it

  1. 1

    Use your provider's defaults unless you have a specific reason not to.

  2. 2

    If you do edit them, keep refresh well under expire, and expire long enough to survive an outage at your primary — two weeks is the usual figure.

  3. 3

    If you do edit them, keep refresh well under expire, and expire long enough to survive an outage at your primary — two weeks is the usual figure.

  4. 4

    Zones migrated between providers often keep the old provider’s values, which is a fair sign the record has not been looked at since.

Conventional values
yourcompany.com. IN SOA ns1.example.net. hostmaster.yourcompany.com. 1 7200 900 1209600 3600

Common questions

Does this affect visitors?
Rarely and indirectly. It is a hygiene signal rather than a fault, which is why it is informational.
What is the minimum field?
Since RFC 2308 it is the negative-caching TTL — how long a 'does not exist' answer is remembered.
My provider manages this.
Then it is almost certainly fine, and this check will pass quietly.

See how your domain does on this check.

All 34 checks, a grade, and the exact fix for anything that isn’t right — in about twenty seconds, no signup.

Other dns hygiene checks