I think I measured Cloudflare's performance and chose it over Google because it was consistently faster. If the stack-stackers are reading, I'd love to hear why they didn't make the list.<p>Also, it'd be a great public service to publish the results. Even if it's just enabled for a day per year or so the results would probably appreciated by many. And you could always sell your altruism as the need to continually monitor the situation :)
Umm, brilliant thank you for this.<p>I ended up with a Dyn / Route53 configuration. We used libcloud to sync everything together. We also added the exported zone to Cloudflare but did not enable it.<p>We had actually planned for this, but in no way did we ever come close to your in depth testing. The @ Azure issue - thank you for uncovering this for the rest of us.
The calculation regarding the ideal number of name servers to list needs some empirical data regarding the likelihood of provider and server outages and the client reactions to it, right? Because otherwise 2 would must be the best number, if I'm not mistaken (Chance of hitting the provider that's offline is always 0.5 on the first try, but the second try would be guaranteed to hit the other).<p>Here's the math for expected number of tries if half of the servers are offline. (It's a hypergeometric distribution but I couldn't find a closed formula)<p>E(2 server) = 1 * 1/2 + 2 * 1/2 = 1.5<p>E(4 server) = 1 * 2/4 + 2 * 2/4 * 2/3 + 3 * 2/4 * 1/3 = 1.67<p>E(8 server) = 1 * 4/8 + 2 * 4/8 * 4/7 + 3 * 4/8 * 3/7 * 4/6 + 4 * 4/8 * 3/7 * 2/6 *4/5 = 1.73
It'd be great if more DNS providers supported "slaving" a zone from an existing server. It would make it much easier to keep DNS synchronized across multiple providers.<p>Hurricane Electric supports this but most of the providers mentioned in this article do not.
From my experience EdgeCast and DNSMadeEasy were consistently the fastest DNS. I guess both were dropped because of price when Google DNS and Route53 did the a similar job.<p>And as other have said, while Cloudflare may not be for everyone, their DNS is possibly the fastest. Not sure why SO decide to drop them.<p>*Some old Data
<a href="http://www.dnsperf.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dnsperf.com/</a><p>I also wonder on the performance of DNSimple. But they dont see to emphasis much on performance.
Netflix have a tool for this as well
<a href="https://github.com/Netflix/denominator" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Netflix/denominator</a>
I'm currently working on a tool [1] that can help with checking if all your different providers are 'in sync' and responding with the same answers. Setups like these are only to grow more common as people realise a single DNS provider is a SPOF of its own.<p>Very good analysis of SO and a smart move to roll this out _before_ a new DNS outage!<p><a href="https://dnsspy.io" rel="nofollow">https://dnsspy.io</a>
Is there a good writeup somewhere about setting up redundant NS records at the zone apex? Or, more generally, "DNS primer for busy developer" article?