
GoDaddy Outage: How to Migrate to AWS Route 53 - davewasmer
http://davewasmer.tumblr.com/post/31283249223/migrating-from-godaddy-dns-to-amazon-route-53
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jread
I recently did some DNS performance analysis and wrote a blog post about
managed DNS services (along with a free report):

[http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2012/08/comparison-and-
analysis...](http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2012/08/comparison-and-analysis-of-
managed-dns.html)

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.

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jcampbell1
Very nice article. I recently switched to amazon from dyn. One thing I noticed
is that amazon has unique hostnames for the nameservers.

Can you comment on how Amazon's use of unique name server names impacted your
results? I have a suspicion that amazon is half as fast because it requires
two lookups instead of 1. ns1.dyn.org is likely to be cached, but
llkadjsf.amazondns.net is unlikely to be cached.

~~~
jread
It won't generally affect the real user test results because of a
warmup/training phase in the test when those DNS records would be cached
within the recursive chain.

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Nyr
Free and reliable alternative from another big ISP: <https://dns.he.net/>

~~~
jakeludington
Since when does trusting a business critical function to a free service make
any sense? At least GoDaddy has a motivation to provide some level of service
because people are paying them.

Some other alternatives that aren't free, but are highly reliable are:
<http://dyn.com/> <http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com>

I use the latter one and in addition to providing an alternative to my
registrar, they also seem to have much faster response times, which cut some
milliseconds off a site lookup.

~~~
Nyr
My suggestion makes sense since they are a very big ISP and they simply don't
care about the cost of a service that they would need to provide to their
clients anyway.

Namecheap does the same and most people think that they provide a good
service.

Seriously, pay if you want, but if you aren't Google, you don't need to pay
for reliable DNS hosting.

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mpclark
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 _will_ wake up and find your site is no longer accessible and
you'll have to remember that this is probably why.

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Dylan16807
The RFC says that if there isn't an explicit MX record then it implicitly
falls back onto the A record. But I'm sure many implementations screw it up.

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BryanB55
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: <http://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-aka-kickassdns>

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.

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.

~~~
MikeKusold
I just switched to them yesterday. They have a very nice import tool that
matches up all your CNAMES and other records.

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vegardx
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.

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?

On another note, hosting DNS is really easy once you get the grip on how
things work.

~~~
d503
When I stopped my Linodes I'm pretty sure I remember they warned that my DNS
would be stopped along with them, so I do think you have to be a paying
customer for that to work.

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rb2k_
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.

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franklaemmer
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.

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azarias
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
<http://cloudharmony.com/dnstest>, but the move so far has been simple, and
new relic reports nearly similar results for us.

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recampbell
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.

I guess someone could service-fy this and have a meta-DNS service which let
you switch backend providers.

Make it so.

~~~
tux1968
You could leave them both live with your name server entries pointing at both
as well. Then there is nothing to do if only one of them goes down. Waiting
until one goes down will mean that requests aren't being served to anyone
getting a cached DNS entry with references to the previous hosts.

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zhoutong
You can get a Anycast zone (basically it's Route 53) for free with a domain on
NameTerrific.

Also the registration is handled by eNom, so you can switch your domain
registrar at the same time.

<https://www.nameterrific.com/>

Disclosure: I'm the founder of NameTerrific.

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jaytaylor
Another option that I've heard good things about is called PowerDNS. It's
full-blown DNS server which includes a RESTful API.

<http://www.powerdns.com/>

<https://github.com/Habbie/powerdns>

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tux1968
Does AWS not offer registrar services? Seems a bit inconvenient to find a
separate registrar.

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tedchs
I use AWS for most things (including Route53, which is awesome), but I
actually like not having my eggs in one basket. If something crazy happens
with my AWS account, I could always theoretically point my DNS resolution
somewhere else. The domain registrar is reduced to an annual auto-bill
transaction on my credit card and they don't have any particular technical
responsibility for my traffic.

~~~
davewasmer
This is a good point - for web based companies, your domain registrar will
always be your single point of failure. So it makes sense to keep it separate,
with the most trustworthy company you can find.

Even in nasty scenario (like GoDaddy's DNS service going down), you can still
point your domain somewhere else, even temporarily. But the worst case, your
domain registrar going down, leaves you with no alternatives.

~~~
saurik
> But the worst case, you domain registrar going down, leaves you with no
> alternatives.

Your domain registrar does not do anything except mediate your ability to
alter your DNS records and allow you to renew your domain name entries: it
really shouldn't matter if they go offline unless they go offline for months
at a time.

You thereby should never, under any circumstance where your domain's
availability means anything to you at all, allow your domain name registrar to
handle all of your DNS records (as many of the people in that "GoDaddy's DNS
Service is Down" thread have done).

Instead, at least some of your authoritative DNS servers should be hosted by
anyone other than your registrar: otherwise, you can end up in the situation
where all of your DNS goes offline _and_ you can't update your DNS records.

(Of course, you should really not have all of your DNS records hosted by a
single company that doesn't have any internal redundancy in the first place;
this criteria alone should exclude companies that don't really care about DNS,
like any registrar ever, from being your only DNS provider.)

(Note: I'm not certain if today's outage of GoDaddy's DNS infrastructure
affected anyone's ability to use their portal to update their DNS records, but
one could easily imagine simple scenarios where that happens.)

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mbell
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.

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

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

