Alternative to GoDaddy DNS hosting?
I’ve heard that GoDaddy is a pretty crappy DNS service. Generally, people seem to complain that their origin DNS servers are quite slow.
I have observed that every once in a while, I do get quite slow DNS resolution of my GoDaddy hosted domains, and would switch if there was an easy (and free) alternative.
I’m surprised that OpenDNS and Google Public DNS don’t let people add their own DNS records for their domains. This seems to me like a natural extension to the services they’re providing.
I’d love to hear if you have any alternatives to GoDaddy that are “known better” in their response times, and that are reputable and reliable. Self-hosting DNS has always seemed like a bad idea to me, but it could be an alternative if the arguments for it are strong enough.
I’m confused by your question. Why does it matter who your nameserver is? Once it’s propagated – it’s propagated. I still use godaddy (has to be one of the worst sites on the Internet) for my nameservers but use OpenDNS otherwise.
Ah, it *does* matter!
There are several things that make for a “bad” root DNS server:
1. They don’t propegate changes in a reasonably fast and consistent manner. In other words, when I change or add/edit my DNS records, what’s the transition like? Do they all switch over instantly? Or, is there some other weird issue? With GoDaddy, they have several DNS servers, and you’re usually assigned 2 of them. They don’t update together, and the delay for propegation of changes can be several hours, or overnight.
2. They’re slow. DNS is cache-based. So, if you have a low to medium traffic website, the chance that your users’ ISP hasn’t seen your domain is actually quite high. That means that those users go back to the origin DNS server for their first request, and if DNS resolution is slow, those users get a bad experience on their first request, which is arguably the most important request.
3. If OpenDNS’s job is to cache and quickly return results for all DNS queries, then I think they should also allow hosting/serving of primary nameservers, and that way, I could register directly with them and be guaranteed good service.