I'm talking for a small operation (personal blog, startup, etc).<p>Currently my DNS is hosted by Cloudflare, however I would like to have more fine-grain control over the zones, including DNS failover and GeoDNS.<p>I am looking into running a resilient pair of BIND servers. They will detect when one of my web servers goes down (e.g. for reboot) and pull the record (which will have a low TTL to avoid excessive caching). I also want to use GeoDNS to point users towards the nearest web server.<p>It seems to be very rare these days for people to run their own name servers. What are some of the common pitfalls and issues related to this?
Pitfalls off the top of my head: Detecting servers going down is not very simple. They don't just go down and become completely unresponsive. Sometimes they become slow, overloaded, generate incorrect responses, sometimes there are connectivity issues, packets get dropped. Sometimes connectivity issues are not globally visible, but affect only some of your users. The number of affected users might increase over time too without you detecting anything. All of the problems apply to monitoring nodes too.<p>The simplest approach that more or less works is to use a single monitoring node close to your users and only make decisions when majority of servers are responsive. Once some server has more than one problem over a few tries, pull its record. Then put it back once it's been free of problems for some time.<p>When updating DNS records automatically increase serial number of the zone. Make sure monitoring node retrieves that serial number from DNS servers on start, to survive own crashes.
Yes.<p>I've run my own servers for my own hobby domains as long as the internet has existed. No issues there. I think people just like the convenience of something they don't have to maintain. Unless you expect your blogs to be controversial enough for a DDoS, there is no need for a commercial DNS provider.