DNS for .co.za and Beyond: A Field Guide for African Domains

DNS is where a surprising number of African outages begin, usually during a migration. Part of it is the .co.za registry's own rules, part of it is the myth that changes take 48 hours, and part of it is nobody remembering which records exist until one goes missing.

The records almost every business needs

• A / AAAA pointing your bare domain and www at your host.
• MX so mail reaches your provider.
• TXT for SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
• CNAME for subdomains like app or docs that follow a platform hostname.

example.co.za.       A      41.0.0.10
www.example.co.za.   CNAME  example.co.za.
example.co.za.       MX 10  mx.digitel.africa.
example.co.za.       TXT    "v=spf1 include:_spf.digitel.africa -all"

About that 48-hour myth

Propagation is not really a thing; caching is. A record is served for as long as its TTL says. Lower the TTL a day before a planned change and cut-over becomes minutes, not days.

# lower TTL the day before, then verify at the authoritative server
dig +nocmd example.co.za A +ttlunits
dig @ns1.digitel.africa example.co.za A

There is no propagation fairy. There is only TTL. Plan the change around it and cut-overs stop being scary.

The .co.za registry requires changes to go through your registrar, and some still batch nameserver delegation updates, so give the delegation itself more headroom than the records inside the zone. When you move to Digitel Africa DNS, we pre-stage the full zone so it answers correctly the instant delegation flips.

Keep an exported copy of your zone file in version control. When someone asks "what changed", a diff answers in seconds and turns a mystery into a one-line review.