For many years now, I’ve used WorldWideDNS.net for the bulk of my DNS hosting. On Monday, they suffered a massive DDoS attack, taking out pretty much everything and making a few of my domains (including 2718.us) unavailable. Now, personally, I consider this sort of attack and outtage at a service provider to be an inevitability, so from my perspective, it’s my own damn fault that my sites went down, since I failed to diversify their DNS across providers. (Also, I have no intention of leaving WorldWideDNS over this—they have always been a great value and good provider from my perspective and a few hours of downtime in years of using them is insignificant to me.)
Over the past few years, as I’ve moved into VPS-based hosting, I’ve also started to use my VPSes as additional DNS servers, keeping the professional hosted-DNS for geographical and connectivity diversity. As this incident has pushed me along in making sure that every domain I host has DNS from at least two different providers, I came to the conclusion that, given that I already have one commercial DNS host (giving me three nameservers), the best economics were for me to get a super-cheap VPS to run as only a nameserver. While not the absolute cheapest, JustGotVPS.com is probably the best price-configuration balance, especially at their cheapest ($5/mo and $8/mo) plans, and they discount for longer-term prepayment. There’s an entry for them, as well as numerous other VPS options around the $5/mo price point at lowendbox.com.
The tradeoff for this versus a commercial DNS host (since in both instances I’m paying about $60/year) is that the commercial host gives me three diverse nameservers but limits the domains, etc., whereas running my own VPS-based nameserver gives me only one host but substantially greater flexibility. I would also note that I chose to get a cheap VPS box from some provider other than my primary VPS provider so that my new additional nameserver would not be in the same datacenter and on the same internet links.
I also have been using EveryDNS.com, a free DNS host, for additional backup (I’ve donated since I’m using them on several domains and they seem to provide a good service), but having used GraniteCanyon and others in the past, I don’t consider a free DNS host as a serious alternative to a commercially-provided option.
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Hi,
I have been using EveryDNS.net for more than 6 years (and donated a few times) and I don’t think it’s a fair comparison with GraniteCanyon
They do have their up and downs and they too are vulnerable to DDoS attacks but from my experience they are pretty solid as a DNS hosting provider.
As of commercial DNS I use DNSMadeEasy.com which uses multiple anycast-based DNS servers across the planet and is actually more cost-effective if you don’t have a huge number of domains.
Posted 24 Jul 2008 at 6:57 pm ¶Scott,
Yes, let me be clearer. I personally am hesitant about all free DNS services because of my past experience with GraniteCanyon. Despite this, I am using EveryDNS and they have been wonderful so far.
I tried to make things work at DNSMadeEasy, but the lag between creating a zone and having it actually show up and be usable was very disconcerting. Also, while they talk about vanity servers and the process they describe seems to work fine for primary zones, secondary zones don’t get assigned the same servers as primary zones (or at least, they didn’t in my case), not even the same number of servers. While I haven’t ruled them out, my experience was strange and not as positive as all the reviews I’d read.
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