I'm wondering how Dyn is taking this. These guys have been working on DNS for years, and were probably one of the first "managed DNS" or "enterprise DNS" services. Over time though they've failed to really innovate, or even keep up with standard (you can't use any of their value add services like the global traffic manager if you also want to use DNSSEC, for instance). Despite this their prices have remained ridiculously high. Now that other players are moving into the market at literally multiple orders of magnitude cheaper it's tough to see why any of their customers would stay.
As a personal note, I would recommend the Edgecast DNS service over anything else. They have amazing customer support (something Google really lacks), and they've been in the CDN game for long enough to know that they are going to be around for awhile. They're also rather crazy about getting the best performance possible.
Route53 is not a bad option. If you're using EdgeCast CDN as well you'll probably get a discount on DNS (and I will point out that the EdgeCast CDN is faster, and more importantly, a hell of a lot cheaper than Cloudfront is).
@nieksand, feel free to get in touch with us at speedyrails.com (EdgeCast's resellers), I'm sure we can offer you a much better price than CloudFront's
I use dyn as well as run several dns servers in different places [1]
My reason for not using this is that it's being offered by google and the obvious fear that they will decide one day to stop offering this, supporting it, or improving it. As I am experiencing now with google voice for example,
[1] Since the mid 90's actually learning from this book:
I'm still with Dyn because their performance is ahead of Route53 and their health-check and failover functionalities are at this moment better than Edgecast.
However, we're using Edgecast for some things because the prices are much lower and they are actually capable of doing the same kind of health-check, failover and routing tricks at Dyn does. Their interface is just not fully ready yet so you have to email support to get changes and custom rules.
EDIT: Very quick non-representative test from 8 locations around the world shows Dyn responds faster than Google DNS in all of them. Note that these were datacenter connections so it could be very different for lower-bandwidth end-users.
Can anyone recommend a cheap DNS service that does geographic-based load distribution? I know that Route53 offers something like this, but AFAIK it's only designed for products hosted on Amazon's platforms.
I've heard that geographic-based DNS has something of a bad reputation, but I think it would be a very good fit for a side project I'm working on.
Check out http://nsone.net - newer service with a unique approach to geo/load balancing/failover using user defined rulesets (filter chains and data feeds).
You can do latency based load balancing to non-AWS endpoints with Route 53 -- the limitation is that you have to associate those endpoints with an AWS region. If your endpoints are not anywhere near an AWS region, you're stuck. Otherwise fine!
@dcc1: could you please email me at brian@<my username>.com? I work for Google Netops and would like to get some additional info from you so we can debug this.
Naïve question but what kind of organizations will benefit the most from this service? Or put it other way, the situations this service is needed for? Can anyone explain to me please?
If you are using Compute Engine or App Engine, this would give you a cheap, API-driven method for managing your DNS zones, without relying on an external service (though, there is nothing wrong with doing so).
It's also likely that Google will continue to improve this service over time, so who knows what the future will hold. In the case of Amazon's Route 53, they have some really neat features for pointing alias records at S3 buckets and Load Balancers.
> what kind of organizations will benefit the most from this service?
Google.
For instance, they could use you hosting your DNS with google as a signal, and it also gives them nice demographics information for sites that do not use GA.
Kind of surprised they don't make it free, compared to the value that would provide given the context of their other offerings they could nail all the competitors in this space while getting plenty of value out for themselves.
The same type of people who use CDNs. If you want great performance globally it helps to have primary DNS services near by, rather than having lookups cross the world.
I understand how CDNs are advantageous by having contents served from locations that are closer to origin of requests (typically browsers spread across the world or a country etc.,).
However, for DNS service to be of similar use does it mean application servers are going to be spread across geographically? For end customers it doesn't matter as they will always use the DNS configured for them by their ISP in most of the cases unless one is tech savvy and tries to use some other DNS such as Google etc.,?
You're an Australian Internet User. You want to see hampsterdance.com 'cause fuck it, you like hamsters.
Your computer asks your ISP's DNS server for the record. If your ISP has it cached you're golden, but it turns out it probably isn't. So your ISP needs to go to ask the hampsterdance.com DNS server directly. If that server is in the United States then you're stuck waiting 133ms in one direction, 133ms back- you've now added a quarter of a second to that page loaded.
Using a DNS CDN means that 266ms ends up being 15ms (keep in mind that these guys also peer with local ISPs to make things even faster).
Thank you very much for this explanation. So for example I have a very basic website with CMS. I use a CDN just because I want to give the best possible experience to my users. I get about 50k users per month, a lot of them are new. Would adding a paid DNS or "DNS CDN" as you put it help my user experience enough to matter?
thank you and thank you. ok that really makes sense. my site is b2b and although transactions do not occur on the website every ounce of frustration I can save matters. we also get a ton of users from US/AU/EU/AS so even with that it would make sense.
I live on the east coast of the USA. Speedtest.net says my ping to my nearest server is 26ms, and to Sydney is 259ms. So it seems it really is that bad.
I'm not up on what the plans for that team are right now. I can say that it is an explicit goal to expose more and more of Google's infrastructure through cloud -- including how we route traffic globally.
Google Cloud DNS is completely different than Google Public DNS. The former is an authoritative DNS service ("hosting") while Google Public DNS is a resolver.
It's a start - barebones authoritative DNS only - no monitoring/failover, load balancing, Geo, LBR, etc - provisioning via API only. Route 53 started out this way, and has since added many of these features and now has almost 7% Alexa 10k marketshare and rapidly growing.
I created a browser test that measures recursive DNS query times. You can test Google DNS query performance using this link: http://bit.ly/1nY4e60
Could you provide any more info on how this test works? Where are the tests performed from, or do they run client side? Does it query name servers directly, or if not, how does it avoid ISP-level DNS caching influencing the results?
Tests are from your connection using whatever resolver chain your ISP has in place. It uses a wildcard name record and an 8 byte json-p include. It alternates between downloading that file from the same origin using a cached DNS record (test run up includes 3 downloads to prime the resolvers with a cached hostname) and an uncached record (a new randomly generated hostname) and reports the difference in time between the two.
Their example for a 'high traffic' site struck me by surprise. With all the caching that goes on with DNS queries, 1.2B in a month seems incredibly high. I wouldn't have even imagined google.com getting that many requests to the authoritative name servers. Can someone with a better idea of how traffic corresponds to DNS queries give me some perspective? How many DNS queries are the name servers for a typical Alex top 10 domain getting?
No kidding. I love the local speeds, and no doubt Google and Amazon do a good job of redundancy, but I'm sure as hell not going to put all my eggs in one basket. Not with DNS.
I had the same problem earlier this year, and if Rackspace or Route53 had AXFR support, I would have used them in a heartbeat...
DNS is so cheap, and Amazon Route53 has such an advantage with their latency based routing, health checks, and integrations with other AWS services. Honestly zones are $0.50 and $0.50 per million queries. You have to be pushing lots of DNS queries to have costs even exceed a tiny bill of $20 a month.
It is the definition of a lot of engineers hours and infrastructure costs for literally no profit for the company. However, it is a basic service every hosting provides has to offer to be competitive.
Given their other Cloud-oriented offerings (Compute Engine and App Engine), I'm not so sure they are doing this to make gobs of money. It's a hole in their service portfolio that they are filling. This can indirectly lead to people being more comfortable choosing Compute Engine, increasing adoption and earning Google more money as a whole.
AWS has Route 53 (which is probably not a huge money maker), Google needs to match them on this. I expect Google's offering to improve over time technically, just like Route 53 has. DNS is but one piece of each company's portfolio, but it's such a critical piece that it's expected to be there.
Unless your app operates at a truly massive scale with a very specific set of characteristics, this won't save you even a minuscule fraction on your total budget. Route 53 is dirt freaking cheap.
There is no point comparing this to AWS Route53. Purely in terms of speed Cloud DNS win Hands Down. I am not sure if the Cloud DNS is the same as their own DNS infrastructure, if so it is pretty damn fast.
The only other two DNS services I recommend is DNSMadeEasy and EdgeCast DNS. Both happens to one of the most affordable as well as fastest. ( Strange combination )
The only bad thing is EdgeCast got brought by Verizon. I am worry if anything bad will happen.
Really? In my very primitive tests, Route53 is considerably faster than Cloud DNS. And DNS Made Easy is faster than both of them.
Personally, DNS Made Easy is my favorite provider by far. Extremely fast, reliable, and priced very well. Plus, you don't have to deal with a sales guy unless you really want to.
I love it when Dyn or other big providers try and woo me. Thousands of dollars a month for DNS? Bahaha.
As a personal note, I would recommend the Edgecast DNS service over anything else. They have amazing customer support (something Google really lacks), and they've been in the CDN game for long enough to know that they are going to be around for awhile. They're also rather crazy about getting the best performance possible.