I’m currently self-hosting my own DNS servers using three VPSes on BuyVM’s anycast network, plus two VPS in Australia. I host some sites that primarily serve Australians, so for those domains I’m using the two servers in Australia. For all other sites, I’m using the BuyVM anycast + one server in Australia as the two DNS servers. One hole in BuyVM’s anycast network is that they don’t have any servers anywhere in APAC so response time aren’t ideal outside of the USA and Europe.
I used to use the anycast servers for other use cases, but these days I’m only using them for DNS. With BuyVM adding a new location (Miami), the cost of anycast with them will be at least $80/year (4 x $20/year VPSes), and at that point I may as well just switch back to an actual DNS provider.
The thing is that I like controlling my domains through my own tooling. I can easily search through all zones to find where particular IPs are referenced (haven’t seen any providers that do cross-zone search in their UI), I can presign zones with DNSSEC, I have scripts to do bulk edits, etc. So I’m looking for providers that allow usage as secondary DNS servers, receiving updates from my server via NOTIFY + AXFR requests.
I used to use ClouDNS, and they’re fine, but their anycast network is… something. As I write this, pings to pns8.cloudns.net from Australia and South Africa are both going to Los Angeles, even though they have servers in both locations (SIS Group in Australia, Hetzner in South Africa): Ping pns8.cloudns.net.
G-Core and entryDNS look interesting, but neither allow usage as secondary servers.
I’m currently doing a free trial with DNSMadeEasy. Their network is extremely fast, and their pricing is really not as bad as I thought it would be for an “enterprise” provider. $5/month for 25 zones, 7500 records and 10m queries per month. The fact that my domain uses the same nameservers as Square.com and other major sites (ns{5-7}.dnsmadeeasy.com) gives me some confidence in them.
Any recommendations for other services to try? Just looking for providers under $70/year that use an anycast network and support usage as secondary DNS.
I think someone mentioned HE.net on your LET thread, and they are definitely worth a look at least.
They do have some peculiarities and transfer sometimes takes up to a minute after notify (but most of the times it’s within a few seconds).
Just noticed that they also recently doubled the amount of domains, from 50 to 100 which is nice.
This is something I’ve liked about DNSMadeEasy while testing them. Whenever I make changes, within a few seconds of my server sending a NOTIFY, the updates have fully propagated across all their servers. I had issues with ClouDNS taking a while to propagate (sometimes ~1 minute).
I do have some domains I don’t care much about so I might just end up using HE.NET for those, or keep them on my own servers but without anycast.
I’ll take a look! Thanks.
Edit: I have looked into a few in that thread in the past (like Zilore), but several of them can only be used for primary DNS rather than secondary.
Or not… after this thread I decided to log in and check something this morning, and now it’s down to 50 again. Who knows, still more than enough for me currently!
Did you check out NS1? Their free plan is limited to 500k and then it quickly add up as you’re billed $8/million queries. Their pricing isn’t very clear, so it might be over budget, but they make it possible to use their servers as secondaries and will AXFR from your (eventually hidden) master. Their network seems pretty decent.
I ended up paying $60/year to DNSMadeEasy and they seem to be working well. I’m at ~2m queries per month at the moment so 500k wouldn’t have been sufficient. The majority of them are DNSSEC-related though, so maybe I’ll just disable DNSSEC…
I used to use Rage4 DNS (previously was a major product with gbshouse over at LET). It was a decent project until pricing just went up and the cost of operation increased tremendously.
I also use DNSMadeEasy. Their newer product Constellix (that they tried to push on current DNSMadeEasy customers) was cool but definitely also increased price of operation a ton. From comparing a ton of different solutions (and time/bs of managing them all), I think DNSMadeEasy just makes sense.
Worst case scenario, you can always just use your domain name broker’s free DNS servers for domains that you don’t really care too much about. Or use Cloudflare’s free DNS hosting as well. That’s what I do. DNSMadeEasy hosts my important domains and the BS domains are hosted through Cloudflare or the registrar’s servers.
