

Amazon Route 53 Reduces Hosted Zone Pricing - espeed
http://aws.amazon.com/route53/pricing/

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jread
If you are interested in DNS performance comparison, I created a tool for
comparing DNS query times of 16 different hosted DNS providers including Route
53, Dyn, DNS Made Easy, UltraDNS, Rackspace, SoftLayer, Easy DNS, Zerigo and a
few others here: <http://cloudharmony.com/dnstest>

It is a browser/javascript based test that uses a wildcard DNS record and
alternating between cached and non cached lookups to determine an approximate
query time for each provider.

~~~
jinushaun
I ultimately went with Route 53 because of the performance. Glad to see your
tests confirms my choice.

Switching to Route 53 from MediaTemple as my DNS was like a night and day
difference. The site felt much faster.

~~~
jpeterson
I'm a little confused here. Wouldn't client DNS resolution performance really
depend on your local DNS cache (e.g. the DNS server at your ISP)? Nobody going
to your site will hit Route 53 or MediaTemple's DNS servers directly. These
only serve as the source of truth for the thousands of DNS caches out there
that clients actually hit.

~~~
jread
Typically this is true as the only performance hit will be due to the initial
lookup, and then your resolver will cache the record. However, if your DNS
record uses a low TTL (required for things like DNS-based monitoring/failover)
like 30 secs or 1 minute, DNS lookups will have a larger impact on site
performance because user resolvers will have to frequently re-query the
authoritative DNS.

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alonswartz
Route53 is an excellent service, and the latest price reduction makes it even
more attractive - but using the API directly as an end user is a little
cumbersome, especially for cloud servers.

A while ago I thought "wouldn't it be great if when launching a cloud server
some magic would happen and the server would get assigned a human/friendly
name of my choice? I'm tired of remembering IP addresses, and logging into my
DNS management console to setup records."

Following that thought we added Domain management and a free dynamic DNS
service to the TurnKey Linux Hub.

If anyone is interested:

<http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/hub-domains> (announcement)

<http://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/hubdns> (documentation)

<https://github.com/turnkeylinux/hubdns> (source code)

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mattront
That is a welcome change. Previously, Route 53 was useless for services that
involve hosting user domains (web hosting, for example) because of $1/month
charge per zone. 1000 low traffic sites would cost $1000 per month just for
domain zones. With the new pricing the cost would be $110. That is close or
even lower than what competitors are charging.

For those on HN who use Route 53: Would you recommend switching from another
provider?

~~~
deefour
I use route53 for all of my domains _(I don't have anywhere near 1000)_. The
$1/mo was worth it to me simply to ease the pain of updating DNS information;
I set the name servers once _(to point to AWS)_ , and then only have to look
to one place _(through shell!)_ to manage DNS. I switch VPS hosts often enough
that having shell based tool like route53 to switch DNS records has come in
very handy. I also have a habit of switching domain registrars regularly.
Having DNS managed by a 3rd party like route53 makes a change like this simple
_(just updating name servers once the transfer's done)_. I don't have the time
to learn how to manage my own DNS server, so I'm happy to pay $1/mo to make my
life a bit easier, and even happier to pay $0.50.

I use pcorliss' ruby_route_53 gem[1].

[1] <https://github.com/pcorliss/ruby_route_53>

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andrewgodwin
We've (Epio) been using Route53 for 6 months or so now, and have had zero
problems with it. The main problem is, as others have said, that the only way
to interact with it is via the (somewhat cumbersome) API.

We got round this by writing our own Python command-line tool using Boto,
which sadly I have yet to release...

~~~
kelleyk
I've been using the wonderful cli53 (available on GitHub here:
<https://github.com/barnybug/cli53>).

All I have to type is "cli53 import example.com --file example.bind --replace
--wait" and it'll replace all of the records for example.com with what's in
the BIND file, and the --wait makes it poll Amazon until the "pending changes"
go through.

~~~
andrewgodwin
Ah, now that looks useful - thanks! And it supports AAAA records, thankfully.

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patrickgzill
I really do not understand the issue with DNS.

It is a dead-simple protocol, and the level of caching at various levels
between your server and the user would seem to make super-fast DNS serving
irrelevant to the browser experience.

As it is, queries on a 2004 level server box running lots of other services
are under 2ms on a local network, so really network latency is the issue...

having 2 simple 1U boxes colocated in NYC and LA, would cost under $200 per
month and give you full control and the ability to host thousands if not tens
of thousands of domains.

~~~
flyt
You're right, it would be cheap to colocate two boxes to run DNS.
Unfortunately you still have to:

\- Purchase the hardware

\- Receive the hardware

\- Install an OS on the hardware

\- Harden the OS from intruders

\- Decide how to manage the servers and setup that infrastructure
(puppet/chef/cfengine/ssh/etc)

\- Install BIND

\- Load in all your zones

\- Ship the server(s) to each of the colo facilities

\- Pay for smart hands to install/configure the hosts

\- Setup a procedure to reliably sync zones from your RCS to the hosts and
safely load zone changes without crashing BIND

\- Monitor the service and hosts

\- Setup alerting and escalations for when there are problems

\- Subscribe to BIND mailing lists and keep up with the community

\- ~once every couple years perform an ASAP update to BIND after a massive
security hole is discovered (without getting compromised during this time)

\- Update BIND regularly

\- Deal with occasional outages at facilities

\- Configure anycast routing for your IP's

Route 53 reduces this to:

\- Make an API call

\- Go back to developing your actual product.

~~~
patrickgzill
I use djbdns / tinydns.

So really, I don't have to do any of that.

What you really would do, given your list above, would be

\- Buy hardware from vendor, ship direct to colo.

\- When racked, they hook up a KVM/IP device that has virtual media support to
the system.

\- You install your OS from your desktop machine.

\- Turn off all services except DNS and public key SSH with hosts.deny and
hosts.allow setup appropriately

\- Use automated scripts to move zones from current setup to djbdns format .

\- Tweak Makefile for djbdns (included in the distribution) to use ssh to move
both the datafile and a text-version backup of the file, to each system. You
can keep your original files on a machine local to you and push the changes
via SSH that way.

\- you should have a machine or two outside your facility to run e.g.
smokeping or other measurement/monitoring tools anyways; so run smokeping etc.
on the same machine and if you are paranoid, run the webserver on 127.0.0.1
and use SSH tunneling to view the pages.

Usually for $100/month per server, you can get outage monitoring and 30
minutes of remote hands per month, included.

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gigawatt
It's still almost 3x as much as dnsmadeeasy.com. I pay $60/year to manage up
to 25 domains with 10mil queries. Looks like Route 53 would make sense if you
need an order of magnitude more queries, though.

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dadro
Has amazon developed an interface for administering Route 53 domains? Relying
on 3rd party interfaces has always been the real deal breaker with Route 53
for me.

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robinduckett
I use CloudFlare to manage my zones for free :/

~~~
simpleenigma
I second that

