I am hosting a number of customers' (and friend's) domain names and websites. In my effort to keep my expenses low I sat down and calculated how much it would have been to move them into the cloud. Since it would actually result in reduced expense (both in terms of money and time) compared to my current setup I am going for it.<p>I will have to "outsource" my current dns setup and I am looking for some reliable [paid or free] service, possibily with a decent web based interface. It would be a plus to be able to deal with domain zone files directly (or with a certain degree of freedom), since I master them pretty well.<p>As of now I found this one: http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/pages/dns.html -- it looks quite good and the prices are not bad at all, but I am wondering if there are any valid alternatives.<p>Thanks
I use everydns. The guy who created it is, amongst other things, an occasional HN user:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidu" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidu</a>
I fail to see the connection between moving your friends' stuff and the DNS hosting.<p>Hosting DNS costs next to nothing, it is hardly any bandwidth, and any old server will do. A $9 / month shared host would do the job.<p>As for hosted DNS, almost every big registrar offers this service, it is fine as long as your requirements are simple.<p>Enom, godaddy, moniker, netsol they all do this, with some of them it is free if they are the party used to register the domain.
If you can afford it, UltraDns (Neustar) is the best. This is the service that Amazon uses, as well as a number of other very large sites. They have a 100% uptime SLA and a latency one as well. We haven't had an outage with them in almost two years. They also have an API which is nice. Oh, and they can do geo-distribution of requests, as well as a variety of other more advanced functions.
I use FastMail to manage DNS for my family domains. In addition to email, they provide an easy to use DNS interface as part of their business/family package. They don't really promote this aspect of their service but it works well.<p><a href="http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/faqparts/VirtualDomains.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/faqparts/VirtualDomains.htm</a>
Enom is reliable and they have APIs, which would likely have some value in your situation.<p>Not sure if you can edit zone files directly though.<p>I run my own nameservers in addition to using enom for registration and some basic domains. I never really considered the cost of maintaining a DNS server to be all that significant.
We've been using dnsmadeeasy for over a year now and have had great service from them. On features vs cost they win hands down. Had a quote from UltraDNS once and it was more than the total cost of our entire hosting infrastructure combined!
I use slicehost for their VPS, but they have a nice restful API for their DNS servers in addition to a web interface. Their cheapest VPS is $20/month, so with that you could get your DNS.
Namecheap is now offering free DNS hosting, even if you don't register your domains there: <a href="http://www.namecheap.com/freedns/free-manage-dns.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.namecheap.com/freedns/free-manage-dns.aspx</a>
SecuritySpace is good and cheap, with POPs all over the US and in Europe.
<a href="http://www.securityspace.com/dns/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.securityspace.com/dns/index.html</a>