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What criteria should I use to choose a good DNS provider?

  • Redundancy - Your DNS service should use at least 4 nameservers. You should also check for the use of anycast servers such as Amazon Route 53 and dyn.com services.
  • Worldwide server location - Servers shall be located worldwide, not just in one country!
  • Ipv6 support - It shall be possible to declare an AAAA entry to your server if it supports IPV6
  • Cost is of course an issue. Some service are free, Amazon Route 53 seems quite cheap.
  • Reliability : SLA is also important, it demonstrate that reliability is measured. Your dns provider shall then state for a refund in case a failure is encountered.

Anything else?

For reference, a couple of links for more information:

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Cost, price, A ping test. You answered a lot of these questions yourself already in your question. I would consider rewriting your question. – chrisjlee Aug 15 '11 at 16:49

closed as not constructive by danlefree♦ Mar 26 '12 at 21:24

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1 Answer

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I'm in the look out for an outsourced DNS too.

I don't want keep my own DNS server and also don't like to migrate hundreads of domains to a new provider every time we change hosting.

So an outsourced DNS provider would come quite in handy.

But I was surprised to find out that there aren't many options, at least my google searches didn't turn up all that many.

And most of the options are too expensive or old and cumbersome websites suchs as DynDNS.

I found out though that Rackspace is planning to launch this kind of service soon, coupled with their cloud solution. I'm looking forward to that.

I also found out that He.net is offering a beta for free, which I signed up for but didn't like their interface too much (falls into the cumbersome / old website category).

Another thing I noticed is that the usual pricing is simply crazy, some providers want to charge per domain (in other words per zone).

Well, my reason to use their service in the first place is that I have way too many small domains to migrate every time I switch hosting.

If it was big domains I could afford to keep my own DNS servers and wouldn't need them.

Or if it wasn't that many domains I wouldn't need a DNS outsourcer in the first place, as I could migrate them easily.

Charging per domain is a deal breaker, plain and simple.

It's so ridiculous indeed that in such a pricing model it would cost me more than my hosting itself.

It would make more sense it they charged per queries only.

$0.50 per million queries – first 1 Billion queries / month

That's the Amazon rate per queries, sounds reasonable to me.

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Thanks Jack, Amazon seems the most reasonable deal to me too so far. – antoinet Aug 28 '11 at 21:21
How often do you change hosting? And do you always move all your sites? – w3d Jun 20 '12 at 7:47

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