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Managed DNS

Good, bad, ugly?

         

william_dw

3:58 pm on Apr 23, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hiya,
I'm looking for opinions on managed DNS services - do they increase traffic, are they more hassle than they're worth, etc?

I've been looking over ultraDNS, and they seem to be ok, the details on thier site talk about a % increase in traffic, citing examples such as freelotto getting a 10% increase. Really they're just talking about getting rid of DNS lookup failures of course, but I'm curious if anyone 'real' has found any return on the time & effort of switching everything over.

Any opinions on this would be great,
As currently I'm sitting on the fence about it.

TIA,
Dw

TallTroll

4:09 pm on Apr 23, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Less hassle = more time to do "real" work. Whats the relationship between the ROI on your time, and the cost of the service?

william_dw

5:08 pm on Apr 23, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Good question,
the prime candidate, ultraDNS (they advertised so heavily that they're almost omnipresent in this area on the web), charge $60/month for "Web Office", which gives 5 domains, 50 records (mx,cname,etc), and 225,000 queries. Additional queries work out at $0.372 per 1,000.

Cost tends to climb a little steeply, for instance 1m hits would work out at around $340/month, over that they do discounts.

Our DNS server has been a titch tempremental of late, which brought this to the fore, but at the same time adding extra RAM would probably fix the occasional DNS blip.

For the amount of visitors the server gets, a 2% increase would be significant, but there's no real way to check the before and after figures other than trying it.

In all I'm leaning towards getting it, but at the same time it's going to take around 3 days in total for the transfer,setup,etc.
Although most of that is waiting for the DNS update to take effect, it's still going to take around a day in real time explaining it to the relevant people, setting up the service, transferring the service, explaining it a second time ;), and then double checking it all works ok.

With those details,
would you go for it?

TallTroll

8:53 pm on Apr 23, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



From my experience, less hassle is ALWAYS worth it, since you never realise how much hassle it is, until it isn't there.

Assuming that you do around 1m hits/month, thats costing you half a day, a day (don't know your fee scale) of time, per month. If your DNS server is playing up now, the problem is likely to increase, not decrease, and the time absorbed will likely increase on an expotential scale, not a linear one. Sounds worth it to me