Managed DNS Service

Is managed DNS worth the cost?

[bandman05]

I have been approached by [a dns provider] and they want us to switch to a managed DNS service. I am a little skeptical of switching to managed DNS. Although it is only a couple hundred a month it seems over priced and honestly we are not having any problems with our current DNS which is just done by our registrar. Does anyone have any opinions about this?

I was shown a report by them that showed our current nameservers are dropping 4% of queries. How does this relate to traffic? I'm assuming that the majority of our traffic never queries our nameservers but rather goes through cached data at their ISP. Thus would we really see additional traffic by switching to a managed DNS solution?

I read a few other posts on this topic but they were all a little dated so I thought it would be good to have new thoughts on the subject

Thanks

Mike
Technology Director

[edited by: txbakers at 1:02 pm (utc) on Nov. 15, 2006]
[edit reason] no personal URLs. or specific companies [/edit]

[txbakers]

Everyone wants to make money and feed their children.

I personally don't see any need for a managed DNS at this stage in my company's life.

[lammert]

I use a specialized DNS company for my websites, but since I moved I haven't seen any noticeable increase of visitors. There are however reasons why to move:

• Specialized DNS providers often have their DNS servers installed in multiple data centers on geographically distant locations. This increases availability and response time.
• You can easily switch between hosting providers by just changing the IP address a domain points to.
• Many DNS providers provide additional services like round-robin DNS for load balancing, automatic failover of the IP address to a backup server when your primary server fails, etc.

There are several DNS providers ranging in costs from almost free, to prices which come close to the costs of website hosting.

[jtara]

A couple hundred dollars a month is fairly costly for managed DNS, unless you have a very large number of domains and/or a very large amount of DNS traffic.

But that is the cost of the top-rung companies. If you can afford the top rung, though, go with it. You won't get better service. (Check the DNS for major web sites, and you will be 1-2 managed DNS companies quite often.)

I'm happy with my second-rung managed DNS company, which uses the same IP Anycast technology but charges a fraction of the price.

And even that "free" company (up to 5 domains free) does a darn good job. (Though no IP Anycast).

In any case, you are going to get a geographically-dispersed network of DNS servers. You may or may not get this from your registrar, and you almost never will get this from your hosting company. (Particulary on plans where you are hosting DNS on your web server!)