Editing DNS zone (section)

{{Technical|date=January 2025}}
{{Use American English|date = February 2024}}
{{Short description|Administrable unit of the Domain Name System}}
[[File:DNS Zone.png|thumb|300px|Illustration of [[Domain Name System|DNS]] zone for ''en.wiki.org'']]

A '''DNS zone''' is a specific portion of the DNS namespace in the [[Domain Name System]] (DNS), which a specific organization or administrator manages. A DNS zone is an administrative space allowing more granular control of the DNS components, such as [[Name_server|authoritative nameserver]]. The DNS is broken up into different zones, distinctly managed areas in the DNS namespace. DNS zones are not necessarily physically separated from one another; however, a DNS zone can contain multiple [[subdomain]]s, and multiple zones can exist on the same server.

The domain namespace of the [[Internet]] is organized into a hierarchical layout of subdomains below the [[DNS root]] domain. The individual domains of this tree may serve as delegation points for administrative authority and management. However, it is usually desirable to implement fine-grained delegation boundaries so that multiple sub-levels of a domain may be managed independently. Therefore, the domain name space is partitioned into areas (''zones'') for this purpose. A zone starts at a domain and extends downward in the tree to the leaf nodes or to the top-level of subdomains where other zones start.<ref>D.B.Terry, M. Painter, D.W.Riggle, S.Zhou, the University of California Berkeley, ''The Berkeley Internet Name Domain Server'', Report No. UCB/CSD 84/182 (1984)</ref>

A DNS zone is implemented in the configuration system of a [[domain name server]]. Historically, it is defined in the [[zone file]], an operating system [[text file]] that starts with the special DNS record type ''Start of Authority'' (SOA) and contains all records for the resources described within the zone. This format was originally used by the [[BIND|Berkeley Internet Name Domain Server]] (BIND) software package and is defined in RFC 1034 and RFC 1035.