# DNS hosting options?



## MannDude (Sep 2, 2014)

Curious what everyone here is using for DNS hosting on an active site. Currently I am using Rage4, which I am quite happy with but it's now costing me $14+/mo, and while that's not a drain on the finances, it does seem to be sort of high for just DNS hosting. With that said, I'm interested in learning what my options are. How is Amazon's DNS service?

Only real requirement is failover support.


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## drmike (Sep 2, 2014)

DNSMADEEASY.


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## MannDude (Sep 2, 2014)

drmike said:


> DNSMADEEASY.


Failover support? Good documentation to support it?


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## drmike (Sep 2, 2014)

Been a long time since I've used or needed DNSMADEEASY's failover.... but it does work (or did).... Fairly solid company with no frills and very straightforward functionality....

http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/services/dns-failover-system-monitoring/

The checks are built into DNSMADEEASY so no sloppy glued together 3rd party monitoring hell.


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## drmike (Sep 2, 2014)

I should note, with DNSMADEEASY you buy an annual right sized plan.

$59.95 probably the plan you need.

10 million DNS lookups a month...

Then you add to that:

DNS Failover / System Monitoring Service $4.95 per A record per year

Definitely less costly I'd think.

Rage: $14 x 12 = $168 a year

DNSMade: $59.95 + 4.95 = $64.90 a year

Even if you need additional A records for failover looking at half the price...


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## Taronyu (Sep 2, 2014)

I'm using Cloudflare for all my domains, I like their api and their interface. Also it is free. Never had any trouble.


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## mikho (Sep 2, 2014)

Mostly Cloudflare, a couple is still using Namecheaps NS.


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## Aldryic C'boas (Sep 2, 2014)

I just run my own - been trying to move everything I do away from third party hosting if I can manage it.  pDNS with slaved SQL running on various VMs spread around the globe, reporting to a central master in Vegas.


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## zed (Sep 2, 2014)

Hidden master at home.


ns1 points to 3 vps (ramnode/prometeus/iniz) currently (slave to hidden master).


ns2-ns5 are HE.net, slave from the three ns1 locations (slave to ns1 addresses).


And i'm a fan of bind9.


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## DomainBop (Sep 2, 2014)

Aldryic C said:


> pDNS with slaved SQL running on various VMs spread around the globe, reporting to a central master in Vegas.


That's basically my setup: pDNS master in Rotterdam on a Xen VPS, a mix of slaves (pDNS VM's and ClouDNS Premium) around the globe.


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## texteditor (Sep 2, 2014)

zed said:


> Hidden master at home.
> 
> ns1 points to 3 vps (ramnode/prometeus/iniz) currently (slave to hidden master).
> 
> ...


I like this strategy


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## eva2000 (Sep 2, 2014)

DNSMadeEasy with 4 failover domains in play


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## Kris (Sep 2, 2014)

DNSMadeEasy

 

$29.95 / year

Included:

10 Domains *

400 Records *

5 Million Queries per Month *

Vanity DNS Included

 

Anycast, stable and constantly the fastest from SolveDNS reports. CloudNS for less important domains. Speed isn't brilliant, but they handled DDoS attacks well months back and have 2 Voxility DCs in the mix.


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## wlanboy (Sep 3, 2014)

Using HE DNS service (+ dynamic A records).

$0 / year.


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## splitice (Sep 3, 2014)

Rage4, cheaper than running my own and it just works


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## SGC-Hosting (Sep 3, 2014)

cPanel DNS Only servers (bind) -- we tried PowerDNS, but we ended up spending more time fixing issues with it than anything else.  We have virtual servers scattered across the country and with all different providers for redundancy.


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## Dylan (Sep 3, 2014)

DNS Made Easy is probably the best managed DNS service out there.

If you really want to stick with Rage4, which I wouldn't, because even though they have some nice features they're REALLY slow (see http://www.solvedns.com/nameserver/ns1.r4ns.com and http://www.solvedns.com/dns-comparison/, 96.84ms average response for Rage4 vs. under 5ms for DNS Made Easy, 23ms for CloudFlare, etc.); you can get a free unlimited account through some partner VPS providers, like Prometeus (I think it's on Biz VPSes and iwStack with them), so you could probably save some money that way.


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## AThomasHowe (Sep 4, 2014)

CloudFlare & DigitalOcean.

I might go back to doing my own DNS hosting though.


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## gbshouse (Sep 4, 2014)

@Dylan - just to be aware, such compraisons don't make any sense in case of authoratative DNS services as you never talk directly to the our servers (your public DNS does). The most important factor is uptime/SLA. You can take a look on those pages to see the results - https://cloudharmony.com/provider/rage4 and https://cloudharmony.com/status-of-dns-for-rage4


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## NodeWest-Dan (Sep 4, 2014)

Rackspace Cloud DNS


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## Dylan (Sep 4, 2014)

gbshouse said:


> @Dylan - just to be aware, such compraisons don't make any sense in case of authoratative DNS services as you never talk directly to the our servers (your public DNS does). The most important factor is uptime/SLA. You can take a look on those pages to see the results - https://cloudharmony.com/provider/rage4 and https://cloudharmony.com/status-of-dns-for-rage




I agree it's not the singular most important thing, but all else being equal 85 extra ms is 85 extra ms, regardless of whether it's added on by a local resolver, recursive resolver, root server, or the authoritative nameserver.


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## gbshouse (Sep 5, 2014)

@Dylan - not exactly, the 85ms is between their test server and our PoP. In case of real scenario, if you use Google DNS for example, the latency between Google and us is minimal, usually few ms


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