A scalable domain name system with persistence and load balancing receives requests from client DNS servers or other DNS servers. Each DNS server is associated with a subset of the DNS groups in the network and the invention checks to see if the client DNS server is part of the DNS group that the DNS server is authoritative. If the DNS server is not authoritative for the client DNS server's group, then the request is forwarded to the proper DNS server. The receiving DNS checks to see if a persistent response is required for the request. If a persistent response is required, the appropriate IP address is returned to the requestor. If a persistent response is not required, the load, availability, and latency of the content servers are used to determine the proper content server's address to return to the requestor.