Providing service for DNS involves a number of considerations that are different from other services, and a greater need for cooperation with other administrators.
Most importantly, to provide DNS at all, someone has to delegate authority for the zone to your designated servers to make the service effective. In most cases this is done by registering a domain with a registrar and supplying the IP addresses of the intended domain name servers. Normally these servers should exist and be configured to serve the domain before you submit the domain registration (this used to be a strict requirement but in today's high-volume environment it's not always enforced -- if the registrar gets their money they tend not to care). You may also be trying to set up a subdomain of an previously registered domain, in which case the organization owning that domain has to delegate authority for the subdomain to you. Careful coordination also prevents what are known as "lame delegations" where the delegator directs name service to a host that does not serve it.
Note that above I referred to DNS servers. It is strongly recommended (although not always absolutely required) that there be at least two DNS servers for a given zone, and that these DNS servers be in locations that are physically separated and reachable through independent network routes. This helps ensure that individual server or network outages will not make all DNS for that zone inaccessible.
In the set of servers for a zone, one is considered "primary" and the others "secondary". The secondaries know to update their copies of zone data from the primary, and only changes to the primary are meaningful to the zone. For the purpose of queries, however, all of the authoritative servers are treated equally.
Because DNS is critical to the function of so many other services, special care should be taken in making changes to DNS information. Typos can inadvertently redirect services to hosts that don't provide them or even disable accessibility for many hosts in a zone.