Cloud DNS

[martin-s]

Is anyone able to recommend a cloud-based DNS service?

 

[PoshTiger]

Zoneedit has always been the market leader I think - it's quite expensive though...

 

[martin-s]

Can you explain more about what exactly you want from a "cloud DNS" service over and above a hosted DNS service? Thanks.

Well, we've got servers at a number of different hosts and I'd prefer somewhere central we can manage all of the DNS. It would also make it simpler to move hosts as and when necessary.

Amazon's Route 53 service looks OK, but a little expensive for the number of zones we have. ($0.10 per zone per month)

Rackspace appear to have a free (!) cloud DNS tool, which I've signed up for but not got any further with yet.

Dyn.com look pretty good, but they don't seem to handle enough zones.

Zoneedit pricing is pretty extreme - $0.42 per zone per month at the cheapest level.

 

[mark]

How many domains?

 

[martin-s]

500+

 

[mark]

Sounds like you just need a managed DNS provider who gives you access to a control panel to edit the zones etc.

Drop me a PM with your budget, and I'll share my notes from when we were looking for the same a while ago, as well as what we did in the end.

 

[skoutuk]

Have you considered running your own primary nameserver and using a secondary DNS service such as http://www.buddyns.com to replicate the zones to.

The primary nameserver could be hidden if required so that it's not exposed.

Rackspace CloudDNS would get pretty tedious for managing 500+ domains (if it even supports that many). I guess it depends how much traffic those domains get as those other managed DNS providers would get pretty expensive for that number of zones (£xxx /month).

 

[martin-s]

I'm quite keen on going with a decent DNS infrastructure rather than putting it together in house. The redundancy is obviously a positive, but also latency improvements from multiple nodes and a decent CDN would be a big plus.

 

[martin-s]

As an update for this, I've gone with the Rackspace Cloud DNS service. Completely free and a pretty good API to automate as much as possible.

 

[skoutuk]

FYI...

3.8.2.1. Domain Limits

By default users may have up to 500 domains per Cloud account (including sub-domains). When a user submits a request to create new domains and/or sub-domains, the system will only accept the request if the total number of existing plus requested domains and sub-domains is within the account domain limit. If the total exceeds the account domain limit, the entire request will be rejected and the following message will be returned:

http://docs.rackspace.com/cdns/api/v1.0/cdns-devguide/content/Domain_Limits.html

 

[martin-s]

By default users may have up to 500 domains per Cloud account (including sub-domains). When a user submits a request to create new domains and/or sub-domains, the system will only accept the request if the total number of existing plus requested domains and sub-domains is within the account domain limit. If the total exceeds the account domain limit, the entire request will be rejected and the following message will be returned:

Thanks for the heads-up. I've sent a support ticket

I'd be interested to know how you get on with their API and designing/implementing some sort of management solution for your zones.

I've put together something basic already, load a single url in the browser and the whole zone gets created. Easy enough to hook up with my catching script

 

[martin-s]

Rackspace have confirmed that the limit still applies, but that an increase is possible subject to approval from the DNS team.