To an Administrator, there is nothing more peaceful than a stable and optimized DNS server. The moment there is a wrong configuration, the server wakes up and starts crying, sites and email goes down. An important part of keeping DNS that way is properly setting up the SOA records.
What are DNS Records. DNS records or Zone files are used for mapping URLs to an IPs. Located on servers called the DNS servers, these records are typically the connection of your website with the outside world. Requests for your website are forwarded to your DNS servers and then get pointed to the WebServers that serve the website or to Email servers that handle the incoming email.

This is how a typical Zone file (containing many common DNS records) looks like.
; Zone file for eukhost.com.
@ 86400 IN SOA ns1.eukhost.com. root.manou.eukhost.com. (
2006061904
86000
7200
3600000
86400 )
eukhost.com. NS IN 86400 ns1.eukhost.com.
eukhost.com. NS IN 86400 ns2.eukhost.com.
eukhost.com. 14400 IN A 69.20.54.201
localhost. eukhost.com. 14400 IN A 127.0.0.1
eukhost.com. 14400 IN MX 0 eukhost.com.
mail 14400 IN CNAME eukhost.com.
www 14400 IN CNAME eukhost.com.
ftp 14400 IN CNAME eukhost.com.
SOA Records
An SOA(State of Authority) Record is the most essential part of a Zone file. The SOA record is a way for the Domain Administrator to give out simple information about the domain like, how often it is updated, when it was last updated, when to check back for more info, what is the admins email address and so on. A Zone file can contain only one SOA Record.
A properly optimized and updated SOA record can reduce bandwidth between nameservers, increase the speed of website access and ensure the site is alive even when the primary DNS server is down.
Here is the SOA record. Notice the starting bracket “