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Can anyone recommend a good third party DNS provider for the cost? I have looked at DynDNS, UltraDNS and DNS Made Easy, however they have high price points.

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3 Answers

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You have "over 100 domains, and we have servers all over" and DNS Made Easy's about ~250 USD per year to host you is too expensive? Nope, I don't know of a DNS hosts who will host 100+ domains with great service for peanuts. (But DNS Made Easy has a 60 USD/year plan, to which you can buy additional domains at 2 USD/year).

You could:

  • Move all your domains to a DNS registrar like GoDaddy or Gandi (my favorite). These will do basic DNS hosting for free, if you purchase the domains and domain renewals through them.

  • Run DNS yourself. It requires only a minimum of server resources, but it's important to secure DNS servers properly. Install BIND or another modern DNS daemon on 2 or 3 existing Linux servers in your colo facility. If the colo goes down, then your DNS is offline, but then so are your other servers which presumably run most of your apps, so perhaps this isn't as bad as it sounds.

  • Run DNS yourself, but use a secondary DNS service provider to share the load. A simple modification of the above, run the primary DNS server yourself, and contract with one of the many secondary DNS providers to run slave DNS servers which simply sync from your primary server.

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you are preaching to the choir, I would prefer to setup our own DNS servers and have pitched this several times but that is not what we are doing, thanks anyway I'll check out Gandi. – Payson Welch Apr 20 '11 at 18:48
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Check out everydns.net. I recommend avoiding neustar (formerly ultradns) because they have a yearly auto-renew account mechanism and they are quite expensive.

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Your domain registrar usually offers DNS services. I know both GoDaddy and Network Solutions offer free DNS services when you purchase a domain through them. That's about as inexpensive as I know besides running your own DNS server. I've used UltraDNS before and was pleased.

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This is for a company with over 100 domains, and we have servers all over. Currently we are consolidating our servers into a colo but don't want to run DNS servers yet. We had been using Rackspace DNS - because we are colocating we won't be using them anymore. Many of our clients retain control over their domains which is why it is handy for us to have a central place to manage DNS, eg they point their NS records to our DNS provider and that will never change no matter where we host their site. – Payson Welch Apr 20 '11 at 13:52
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Based on your comment (which by the by should probably have been part of your question as it's important information!) hosting your own DNS servers is probably the Right Solution, even though it's not what you want to hear. Alternatively many CoLo providers offer DNS services with an attractive price point (it's a throwaway service for them) -- have you spoken to your provider? – voretaq7♦ Apr 20 '11 at 14:24

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