GoDaddy Outage: How to Migrate to AWS Route 53

I recently did some DNS performance analysis and wrote a blog post about managed DNS services (along with a free report):<p><a href="http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2012/08/comparison-and-analysis-of-managed-dns.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2012/08/comparison-and-analysis...</a><p>Route53 is a good choice for DNS compared to GoDaddy. It has better DDOS mitigation including custom DNS hostnames across different TLDs for each zone, and zone segmenting across their network.

Free and reliable alternative from another big ISP: <a href="https://dns.he.net/" rel="nofollow">https://dns.he.net/</a>

It might be worth mentioning for those that aren't totally confident with DNS that (a) errors in setting up your DNS can take your services off line in unexpected ways (anyone else ever forgotten to put in an MX record and only realised three days later they weren't getting any email?) so be careful, and (b) at the low end one advantage of letting your host manage your DNS is that they can make changes behind the scenes -- for example, changing the IP of your website or moving your account to a different physical machine -- and they'll just update your DNS and everything keeps working. If your site is hosted somewhere like DreamHost but you put your DNS somewhere else, one morning you <i>will</i> wake up and find your site is no longer accessible and you'll have to remember that this is probably why.

I'd also recommend taking a look at cloudflare, their DNS service is supposed to be pretty fast, I haven't done any measuring myself but here's a recent post they wrote: <a href="http://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-aka-kickassdns" rel="nofollow">http://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-aka-kickassdns</a><p>So far I've been very happy with their service and it's nice to not only get good DNS hosting but also some security and CDN support.<p>I switched everything away from Godaddy along time ago. In the past, oh I dont know, maybe year or so, it seems like Godaddy has received so much negative publicity. First with the elephant killing, then with supporting SOPA and now this.

Another option is the Linode DNS Manager. They also have a pretty decent (as far as I can tell, never used it, have my own solution) API for managing them. Or you can just do it via the website.<p>As far as I can tell it's free of charge, as you only need to be a member, but since I host two of my external DNS servers there I cannot actually check that you don't have to be a customer. Maybe a fellow HN user can verify?<p>On another note, hosting DNS is really easy once you get the grip on how things work.

Another nice options is Cloudflare. Especially for small personal blogs, they are free and even offer to put a CDN in front of your data.

After a similar DDoS attack on the german provider InternetX we simply set up our own backup name servers. One can do this on a VPS.

Just moved ours to Route 53 in the afternoon. I had been on the fence lately, especially after doing a few of the tests on <a href="http://cloudharmony.com/dnstest" rel="nofollow">http://cloudharmony.com/dnstest</a>, but the move so far has been simple, and new relic reports nearly similar results for us.

We recently wrote a tool which can populate our DNS entries in either Route 53 or another provider (can't recall which). So if one goes down, we can run a script which brings up our DNS entires in the alternate provider.<p>I guess someone could service-fy this and have a meta-DNS service which let you switch backend providers.<p>Make it so.

You can get a Anycast zone (basically it's Route 53) for free with a domain on NameTerrific.<p>Also the registration is handled by eNom, so you can switch your domain registrar at the same time.<p><a href="https://www.nameterrific.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nameterrific.com/</a><p>Disclosure: I'm the founder of NameTerrific.

Another option that I've heard good things about is called PowerDNS. It's full-blown DNS server which includes a RESTful API.<p><a href="http://www.powerdns.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.powerdns.com/</a><p><a href="https://github.com/Habbie/powerdns" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Habbie/powerdns</a>

Does AWS not offer registrar services? Seems a bit inconvenient to find a separate registrar.

Side note: If your moving and need to figure out a way to redirect a naked domain without having to run a server, and also happen to be using Google Apps then Google Apps will actually do this for you. Its in the Domain settings in the admin panel.

I really wish Route53 did secondary DNS using normal bind zone-transfer protocol.

If GoDaddy is my domain registrar, but I host my domain on CloudFlare and GoDaddy goes down, will my domain go down?