Route53 is a good choice for DNS compared to GoDaddy. It has better DDOS mitigation including custom DNS hostnames across different TLDs for each zone, and zone segmenting across their network.
Very nice article. I recently switched to amazon from dyn. One thing I noticed is that amazon has unique hostnames for the nameservers.
Can you comment on how Amazon's use of unique name server names impacted your results? I have a suspicion that amazon is half as fast because it requires two lookups instead of 1. ns1.dyn.org is likely to be cached, but llkadjsf.amazondns.net is unlikely to be cached.
It won't generally affect the real user test results because of a warmup/training phase in the test when those DNS records would be cached within the recursive chain.
Thanks for posting this. I thought the high end providers had much better response times than this. I was under the impression that in the US they were under 50ms for direct queries. I find it interesting you say that up to 200ms is good.
Since when does trusting a business critical function to a free service make any sense? At least GoDaddy has a motivation to provide some level of service because people are paying them.
I use the latter one and in addition to providing an alternative to my registrar, they also seem to have much faster response times, which cut some milliseconds off a site lookup.
My suggestion makes sense since they are a very big ISP and they simply don't care about the cost of a service that they would need to provide to their clients anyway.
Namecheap does the same and most people think that they provide a good service.
Seriously, pay if you want, but if you aren't Google, you don't need to pay for reliable DNS hosting.
Do you know if I can host multiple domains on my free account at CloudFlare? i.e. if I open an account for mysexyblog.com, but I also want to host: mysexyecommercestore.com and myunsexywebsite.com (both of which are not related to mysexyblog.com) can I do it with no problems?
It might be worth mentioning for those that aren't totally confident with DNS that (a) errors in setting up your DNS can take your services off line in unexpected ways (anyone else ever forgotten to put in an MX record and only realised three days later they weren't getting any email?) so be careful, and (b) at the low end one advantage of letting your host manage your DNS is that they can make changes behind the scenes -- for example, changing the IP of your website or moving your account to a different physical machine -- and they'll just update your DNS and everything keeps working. If your site is hosted somewhere like DreamHost but you put your DNS somewhere else, one morning you will wake up and find your site is no longer accessible and you'll have to remember that this is probably why.
I'd also recommend taking a look at cloudflare, their DNS service is supposed to be pretty fast, I haven't done any measuring myself but here's a recent post they wrote: http://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-aka-kickassdns
So far I've been very happy with their service and it's nice to not only get good DNS hosting but also some security and CDN support.
I switched everything away from Godaddy along time ago. In the past, oh I dont know, maybe year or so, it seems like Godaddy has received so much negative publicity. First with the elephant killing, then with supporting SOPA and now this.
Another option is the Linode DNS Manager. They also have a pretty decent (as far as I can tell, never used it, have my own solution) API for managing them. Or you can just do it via the website.
As far as I can tell it's free of charge, as you only need to be a member, but since I host two of my external DNS servers there I cannot actually check that you don't have to be a customer. Maybe a fellow HN user can verify?
On another note, hosting DNS is really easy once you get the grip on how things work.
When I stopped my Linodes I'm pretty sure I remember they warned that my DNS would be stopped along with them, so I do think you have to be a paying customer for that to work.
Just moved ours to Route 53 in the afternoon. I had been on the fence lately, especially after doing a few of the tests on http://cloudharmony.com/dnstest, but the move so far has been simple, and new relic reports nearly similar results for us.
We recently wrote a tool which can populate our DNS entries in either Route 53 or another provider (can't recall which). So if one goes down, we can run a script which brings up our DNS entires in the alternate provider.
I guess someone could service-fy this and have a meta-DNS service which let you switch backend providers.
You could leave them both live with your name server entries pointing at both as well. Then there is nothing to do if only one of them goes down. Waiting until one goes down will mean that requests aren't being served to anyone getting a cached DNS entry with references to the previous hosts.
I use AWS for most things (including Route53, which is awesome), but I actually like not having my eggs in one basket. If something crazy happens with my AWS account, I could always theoretically point my DNS resolution somewhere else. The domain registrar is reduced to an annual auto-bill transaction on my credit card and they don't have any particular technical responsibility for my traffic.
This really seems to make the most sense. It's just a name. An entry in a registry's zone file. It has nothing necessarily to do with your infrastructure (which does not need names to function; even email can work without domain names). A name is just a name. It provides no "availability" of network resources. But how many customers understand this?
The problem that flows from this lack of understanding is registrars (people who sell names, entries in some registrar's zone file) push hard for the "upsell" and succeed get customers to sign up for all these other services that are quite different from registrar services. They are qualitatively different services and require significantly more resources than just selling (renting, actually) names.
This is a good point - for web based companies, your domain registrar will always be your single point of failure. So it makes sense to keep it separate, with the most trustworthy company you can find.
Even in nasty scenario (like GoDaddy's DNS service going down), you can still point your domain somewhere else, even temporarily. But the worst case, your domain registrar going down, leaves you with no alternatives.
> But the worst case, you domain registrar going down, leaves you with no alternatives.
Your domain registrar does not do anything except mediate your ability to alter your DNS records and allow you to renew your domain name entries: it really shouldn't matter if they go offline unless they go offline for months at a time.
You thereby should never, under any circumstance where your domain's availability means anything to you at all, allow your domain name registrar to handle all of your DNS records (as many of the people in that "GoDaddy's DNS Service is Down" thread have done).
Instead, at least some of your authoritative DNS servers should be hosted by anyone other than your registrar: otherwise, you can end up in the situation where all of your DNS goes offline and you can't update your DNS records.
(Of course, you should really not have all of your DNS records hosted by a single company that doesn't have any internal redundancy in the first place; this criteria alone should exclude companies that don't really care about DNS, like any registrar ever, from being your only DNS provider.)
(Note: I'm not certain if today's outage of GoDaddy's DNS infrastructure affected anyone's ability to use their portal to update their DNS records, but one could easily imagine simple scenarios where that happens.)
Side note: If your moving and need to figure out a way to redirect a naked domain without having to run a server, and also happen to be using Google Apps then Google Apps will actually do this for you. Its in the Domain settings in the admin panel.
http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2012/08/comparison-and-analysis...
Route53 is a good choice for DNS compared to GoDaddy. It has better DDOS mitigation including custom DNS hostnames across different TLDs for each zone, and zone segmenting across their network.