An Engineer's Guide to DNS

[sh1mmer]

http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/11/an_engineers_gu.html

[ccollins]

"The DNS hosting service typically thrown in for free by domain registrars is not very good. For most sites, solid DNS hosting costs about $USD 50 per year. It's worth the effort. Heck, set up with two different services for failover."

Can anyone recommend a company that provides solid DNS hosting? Are there measurable performance benefits? Thanks!

[aristus → ccollins]

I could not put it in the article, but for my personal projects I use worldwidedns.net and mtgsy.com. I've also used DNSPark.net but their admin interface is nasty.

[jpeterson → ccollins]

Well I can't speak for all domain registrar DNS services, but I've had nothing but great experiences with the free DNS service at Namecheap. It's a nice interface, very configurable, and the updates are fast.

[smhinsey → ccollins]

There can definitely be benefits to the very important first visit to a site, particularly if you have a lot of subdomains (images, static, movies, whatever) that need to be resolved. The faster they resolve the faster the site will seem. Unfortunately I can't make any recommendations.

[daydream → ccollins]

When I looked into this a few years ago dyndns.com was a good affordable service.

[epi0Bauqu → ccollins]

dnsmadeeasy.com

[lennysan → ccollins]

ultradns.com - fast, reliable, scalable

[WALoeIII → lennysan]

Absurdly expensive.

[nailer]

'It's hard to observe the DNS directly yet it exerts an obscure, pervasive influence without which everything would fly apart'

They're right, but a tip: dnstrace is brilliant for doing exactly that.

[timf → nailer]

I like dnstracer better: http://www.mavetju.org/unix/dnstracer.php

[nailer → timf]

dnstracer is actually the tool I meant, oops.

Easy to get confused (especially since from an end user [but not backend] point of view, they're both similar to traceroute).

[giardini]

A minor irritant: using "the DNS" rather than merely "DNS" (but NOT in the title!). I find that somewhat distracting. Examples:

" It's hard to observe the DNS..."

"Using the DNS is often compared to..."

When should "the DNS" ("the domain name system") become "DNS"? Should it?

I'm currently reading: Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought". My apologies for unshouldering this heavy linguistic burden.

[aristus → giardini]

Yeah, it bothered me too. :) I was trying to get across that I was talking about a singular world-spanning entity instead of some abstract protocol. I'm not sure of the real grammar rules.