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Ask HN: any suggestion for DNS providers? (need to outsource my bind setup)

11 points by markup ↗ HN
I am hosting a number of customers' (and friend's) domain names and websites. In my effort to keep my expenses low I sat down and calculated how much it would have been to move them into the cloud. Since it would actually result in reduced expense (both in terms of money and time) compared to my current setup I am going for it.

I will have to "outsource" my current dns setup and I am looking for some reliable [paid or free] service, possibily with a decent web based interface. It would be a plus to be able to deal with domain zone files directly (or with a certain degree of freedom), since I master them pretty well.

As of now I found this one: http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/pages/dns.html -- it looks quite good and the prices are not bad at all, but I am wondering if there are any valid alternatives.

Thanks

30 comments

[ 18.6 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] thread
brk
Enom is reliable and they have APIs, which would likely have some value in your situation.

Not sure if you can edit zone files directly though.

I run my own nameservers in addition to using enom for registration and some basic domains. I never really considered the cost of maintaining a DNS server to be all that significant.

carl_
Enom have had several large scale outages in recent memory.

We've got nearly 3000 domains under our enom reseller account, I wouldn't touch any our domains on their nameservers.

jacquesm
I fail to see the connection between moving your friends' stuff and the DNS hosting.

Hosting DNS costs next to nothing, it is hardly any bandwidth, and any old server will do. A $9 / month shared host would do the job.

As for hosted DNS, almost every big registrar offers this service, it is fine as long as your requirements are simple.

Enom, godaddy, moniker, netsol they all do this, with some of them it is free if they are the party used to register the domain.

markup
It's about paid customers and not only friends. Paid customers expect a smooth service. At the moment I have multiple (virtual and physicall) servers around the world to both host and deal with nameservers. This solution is time and money consuming, so I am moving to a different approach.

A single shared nameserver does not grant a 100% uptime and costs 2x the price of the business plan that company I linked earlier is offering. I call this an expensive and badly implemented solution.

A single self-hosted nameserver does not grant a 100% uptime and requires a fitting internet connection and an old box to run bind on. At the moment I do not have an old box or server to run bind on, and even if I had it, the box could die and I would have to deal with the downtime (single nameserver), buy spare parts, lost time to fix the box and at the moment I do not have a fitting internet connection.

Godaddy's dns hosting is utter crap, it seriously hurts my eyes and needs a bazilion clicks to accomplish a simple task so I am looking for valid alternatives providing more than one nameserver, with uptimes close to (better yet: matching) 100%, to save money and time and keep paid and free customers happy.

hboon
Have been using dnsmadeeasy.com for some time. Reliable so far and have heard good things about them.
ghshephard
Since when was running named on a pair of servers (put one on linode and one on slicehost for redundancy) not work for all but the larger companies? And by the time you are that large, cost of name servers is so insignificant as to be round off error.

I always used to think that I was missing something special about DNS - I mean, it can't be as simple as configuring named.conf for a master and slave, creating a zone file, tossing an SOA plus some Resource Records into it, could it? Perhaps it's because I keep a 500 page copy of "DNS and BIND" on my desk, and perhaps it's because large deployments of DNS _are_ complex - but for the vast majority (and certainly anybody simple enough to outsource there DNS to a hosting organization) - it's a pretty straightforward, solved and inexpensive problem.

The one reason to do this, I guess, is if you just are done with the "part-time-systems-administrator" gig, and would just like to wash your hands of it. But, if you have to do some of it already, the incremental cost of running for multiple organizations is pretty insignificant.

I realize, btw, that this is off topic - and you are actually looking for guidance on out-sourced DNS servers - I just couldn't restrain my fingers when I caught your paragraphs noting the cost of parts and servers. $40/month buys you two servers, one with slicehost and one with linode.

There are a lot of reasons to hand your DNS to a third party (Nice interfaces, handling the customer service, hassle-of-managing) - but cost of servers/internet isn't one of them.

markup
> There are a lot of reasons to hand your DNS to a third party but cost of servers/internet isn't one of them.

Alright: it's USD480/year (plus administrating those two servers) vs. USD58/year but no, "cost of servers/internet isn't a reason". Ok, great.

jacquesm
old box at your house on a static ip, old box at your friends house who uses a different provider.

Cost $0 if you have some old stuff lying around + the power they use.

Cheaper and just as good. The chance of both providers going down at the same time is pretty slim.

Heck, I'll host your secondary if you want it for free, it's not like I'll notice the bandwidth. Primary is different because you'll need access, secondary is just a bunch of lines in a conf file, it'll update when your primary does.

mail me at j@ww.com if you want to take me up on that offer.

jacquesm
Another way of looking at this is that you need many more customers. The overhead of doing all this for a handful of customers is significant, it only starts to pay off at certain economies of scale.
markup
I'm just a webdeveloper hosting some of the people/companies website I work for. Since from time to time I have to get my hands dirty with their projects again, I prefer to do so in an environment I know because I set it up personally. If I had to let them decide, most of them would go for crappy inexpensive hosting providers and additionally I would have to deal with a lot of passwords when I get to deal with their stuff again.

The money I live with comes from me coding stuff, not from the hosting. Since I am trying to get a personal project up and running I am trying to cut all the expenses (time/money) I can possibily cut or reduce; that's all.

jws
In Gandi's expert mode you can deal with the RRs directly, but as with any DNS provider you will have to move the names there.
davidw
I use everydns. The guy who created it is, amongst other things, an occasional HN user:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidu

socialtistics
We use everydns.com here as well. It is free, but they do ask for donations. If you donate I think it is at least $15 they will remove the restrictions on the number of domains you have. They have an easy to use web interface and are extremely reliable. Overall we couldn't be happier with them.
markup
Thank you guys, I'll try it out
unsane1
I use everydns as well, and donated, but never got credit for it. Though I'm happy I donated and still like the service.
jamesbritt
I'm also a fan and user of everydns. I tried running my own DNS server, but the assorted annoyances got the better of me.
zacharypinter
I use slicehost for their VPS, but they have a nice restful API for their DNS servers in addition to a web interface. Their cheapest VPS is $20/month, so with that you could get your DNS.
moe
dd24.net
cmer
dnsmadeeasy is AWESOME. Been using them in production for 2 years, zero downtime, always super fast, and dirt cheap. You can't go wrong with them.
grandalf
I love dyndns.org But using it for multiple domains gets a bit expensive.
kareemm
we used dnsmadeeasy at my last startup and had absolutely no problems. it was set-and-forget, which is why i'd recommend them now.
bmatheny
If you can afford it, UltraDns (Neustar) is the best. This is the service that Amazon uses, as well as a number of other very large sites. They have a 100% uptime SLA and a latency one as well. We haven't had an outage with them in almost two years. They also have an API which is nice. Oh, and they can do geo-distribution of requests, as well as a variety of other more advanced functions.
carl_
Last time I checked they charged per 1,000 DNS requests?
moomerman
We've been using dnsmadeeasy for over a year now and have had great service from them. On features vs cost they win hands down. Had a quote from UltraDNS once and it was more than the total cost of our entire hosting infrastructure combined!