Whats a good DNS TTL value?

Too many DNS quaries cost too much

[Herath]

Our current DNS TTL is 86400. Our DNS provider gets about 200,000 quries per month for our domain.

It's becomming expensive as they charge 0.50 per 1,000 quries. So, thinking of increating the TTL.

Hoping to hear from the webmasterworld DNS gurus about a good TTL value. We don't have the need to make DNS changes often.

[drbrain]

A better idea would be to find somebody who will host your DNS for a flat rate, or free. 20 queries for a penny is a hell of a lot, considering a query consists of 2 packets.

At about 256 bytes per transaction, your DNS hosting costs you $2 per megabyte!

[drbrain]

Refiguring, you must mean $.005 per 1000 transactions, which means $2 per 100 megabytes, which is still quite a bit.

[Herath]

DrBrian,

Its 0.50 for 1000 queries. They give 10,000 for US$6.0 and 0.50 if you go overboard.

Its ultradns.com

Their DNS service is apparently much more superior to others. Big dogs like Sun, Sprint, Verizon host DNS with them.

[DaveAtIFG]

My hosting company is reputable and reliable. They include DNS service with hosting service at no extra cost, as do most hosts I've dealt with. The TTL they prefer is 86400 seconds.

If you're using the ultradns sitebacker service, you're paying for the redundancy/monitoring/failover features and it's probably cheap insurance, just as it's set up.

[mcavic]

86400 (24 hours) is a long time if you need to make an emergency change. You could try doubling or tripling it, though.

If you only have one Web server, then you probably don't need the extra features that you're paying for. But, it is important that a DNS provider be reliable.

[upside]

It's better to use more nameservers (on different networks, of course) and use a lower TTL. On some sites, I use 6 nameservers with a TTL of 60. Some networks won't honor a TTL that low but it's good for the ones that do. 24 hours is an eternity if you need to make an emergency DNS change to keep your business online.