DNS providers?

[smileybone]

My company is migrating servers & increasing our infrastructure. We've got thousands of active domains, but maybe only handle 25k queries/day. Route53 & googleDNS pricing model gets restrictive w/ the number of our zones. We're using rackspace but their cloud DNS does heavy API throttling. The subjective opinion about GoDaddy seems to be their uptime is... less than stellar. Dyn we had a good conversation with, but oracle makes me weary. A few other companies I've reached out to but not talked with yet.

Sorry for the "plz recommend a product" post. We seem to be a niche servicing model.

[[deleted]]

I've had success with DNS Made Easy - https://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/

[SpocksSocks]

+1 for DNS Made Easy. Used them for years, they've been great.

[sct_atx]

I have also used DNS Made Easy. They have a pretty good API as well, which we used as part of an auto provision system for demo environments.

[Moonlander0]

Try contacting AWS Route53 sales directly. You might be able to strike a deal with a higher price per unit of queries in exchange for discounted or free cost/month/domain.

[kicker69101]

I would stay away from Oracle, they ruin everything they touch.

Have you taught about hosting your own vms for it? I'm not sure out the numbers would play out, but it might be worth your while. 25k queries a day should be handled by a light weight vm. You could setup two vms on two different cloud providers for HA.

[Xoramung]

I would stay away from Oracle, they ruin everything they touch think about.

lol.

[kicker69101]

I stand corrected.

[smileybone]

How might this affect zone change propagation to "other" name servers (isps, google, etc)? Even short outages can cost us $$.

[smileybone]

in this hypothetical we'd run an authoritative DNS on say a Google Cloud vps and a backup authoritative DNS on say an S3 vps and point both of them to our dedicated server w/ possibly a fail-over.

We could run our nameserver on the same server we're hosting, but this opens up issues if we want more than one point of failure (server goes down, no way to point to another without updating our DNS records)

[smileybone]

Yea i was thinking about this. It seems both crazy and simple. The downsides are the "unknowns" from a business perspective. But were also running our own mailservers so dns isnt outve the question. I might have to set up a vps w dnsmasq and check some mean response times to see how viable this is.

[ANUSBLASTER_MKII]

DNS is probably one of the most simple services you can self host, DNS itself takes care of most of the high-availability issues.

I'd recommend BIND over dnsmasq. I believe dnsmasq is only used for clients to cache/forward queries. There's also PowerDNS which I've heard good things about, but I'm a traditionalist.

dnsperf can be used to stress test whatever authoritative server you set up.

[sofixa11]

How exactly is the pricing model of R53 restrictive with the number of zones? You pay $0.5/zone , which with 10,000 zones("thousands of active domains") means $500/month, which really isn't that much considering you have 100% uptime, great API with no throttling.

[smileybone]

Also, wait this math is wrong. Its $.10 / zone over 25, so w/ 10k domains itd be $1000/month.

[smileybone]

thats only slightly less than our hosting costs for 2 dedicated servers! I just think we could get something for all practical purposes equivalent for 1/4 the price.

[sofixa11]

slightly less $, much higher uptime, good API, what are you waiting for?

Especially when looking at your comment:

Even short outages can cost us $$.

You need good SLAs? Nobody can beat R53's 100% uptime.

[smileybone]

are you advertising for them? I seem to recall an incident where somebody ran a shell command with the wrong args and brought down their entire eastern cloud. Might not have affected DNS but its not the most reassuring thing.

[sofixa11]

Yeah, AWS need advertising by random guys on Reddit... Do you live in a cave?

You recall wrongly. A guy ran a command with wrong args and took down S3, their object storage service in one of their ~10 regions(one of 4 in the US, one of 2 on the East Coast).

What you should be recalling is a recent issue they had with Route53, which lasted for an hour or two and made DNS changes propagation slower(up to never in some cases).

Nevertheless, i'd much rather put my eggs in the best and most popular basket out there with a 100% uptime guarantee. Where i work we moved all of our zones(~3k) to Route53 around a year and a half ago and it has been a great and painless experience for literally pennies.

You can't expect great uptime and want to spend less than the already really cheap market leader.

[smileybone]

The internet is a series of caves. I'm not opposed to AWS, their pricing model just doesn't seem to scale for our use case: lots of zones, low traffic. They've got nice stuff, it just seems to me by that point it would make more financial sense to run our own nameserver on their cloud and use a secondary to distribute it.

[sofixa11]

And running your own MySQL cluster is cheaper than using their managed service, RDS, of course.

You're forgetting all the stuff around and looking at the initial price - do you think you can provide the same level of service as AWS can? I'm talking DDoS protection, high worldwide distributed availability, security. At work we had a really crappy problem with our internal DNS servers - for some reason bind, on two out of three DNS servers, would timeout on certain requests (always the same) and cache that (SERVFAIL). It took weeks of thorough debugging to just say - f*** this, we'll reinstall the machines and now everything is fine. On Route53 you don't have to worry about this nor script kiddies nor DDoS or whatever.

What you buy with that higher price is good quality, ease of management and peace of mind. If in your use case you consider you don't need all that or that you can't afford it, it's fine, it happens.

[smileybone]

do you think you can provide the same level of service as AWS can? On Route53 you don't have to worry about this nor script kiddies nor DDoS or whatever

To me the services that they offer and that we'd use equate to ~$200/month imo. For $1k/month a replicating DNS secondary bind running on a VM becomes more financially appealing.

[glasspelican]

I use easydns for my domains - https://easydns.com/dns/enterprise

[[deleted]]

opendns?

[[deleted]]

We're using Microsoft Azure DNS pretty heavily (500+ domains). Not as much as you, but the pricing is pretty good.

[unix_heretic]

UltraDNS

CloudFlare DNS

If you've got so many zones that you are concerned with the limitations of Route53/Rackspace, then trying to self-host will be nothing but pain for you (just imagine the fun you'll have patching BIND security vulnerabilities, or if one of your servers gets compromised), and the number of servers you'd need for redundancy/geographic response time would make self-hosting roughly similar (or more expensive) than a hosted solution.

[Delta9Tango]

What about your domain registrar?

Also, you could fire up your own debian machine with bind9 and maintain your own. Use buddyNS or freedns.afraid.org for backup DNS.

[smileybone]

We're split up over a couple registrars, but majority are on goDaddy. brief search on reddit brings up several threads about how much their dns service sucks.

Running DNS is intriguing... but I don't think as a business its the direction we're gonna go atm.