New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Geo DNS
Is there anyone offering geo DNS at lowend prices?
I want to send my visitors either to some server in Europe or the US depending on where they are.
DNS Made Easy does it but at $55/month it's cheap but not in the "lowend" range. I saw references to "RAGE4" in the forums here but their website is broken at the moment which does not inspire confidence.
Traffic is tiny.
Comments
There aren't many geodns providers in budget area beside rage4. What exactly is "broken"?
Broken? as far as I know it works Ok. Feel free to try our service. GeoDNS is included in our free usage tier
dnspod for free...
How has development been coming along on the proposed features for Rage4? Namely the "Next major release -Mar 4, 2013"
We have released few major releases since March, next big one is in progress - DNSSEC support and community based geolocation databases
Rage4 works well if you only have 2 or 3 servers hosted in major spots (i.e. NL/UK or USA). Rage4 starts to have issues (or you have to do an exceptional amount of configuration) when you have 12 servers around the globe and you want to route countries/customers to closest server with the best connectivity.
EdgeDirector is another similar service.
@jimpop - it all depends, we have customers with large number of servers in closest first mode, each generating more then 100 000 000 request per month and for them it works like a charm
I guess it's just those with a dozen or so servers. I can see where Closest First would work well if someone had 1 server per country, or just 2 servers for the whole world. But someone with a dozen servers... things start to get interesting. ;-)
@zorked Before I moved over to Rage4, I used AWS Route53. Instead of geoip db lookups, its routing based on known latency to EC2 DC's. I tended to have servers close to them anyways so that actually worked out.
The whole idea of Geo DNS is a little flawed by design, especially in some countries where ISPs just don't want to peer and backhaul everything to another country, usually thousands of kilometers away.
It would be nice if there could be some "per-AS DNS replies", but i can imagine this can get quite hard to maintain.
Akamai years ago used to use ping to determine which server would be most appropriate to point the requests too.
Rage4 works well, especially with closest first. I have multiple US servers and it does route properly depending on location.
Sometimes the assumed closest-first geo value for an IP is off; there is, thankfully, a manual coordinate option to correct that.
Indeed Rage4 works well in closest first mode, just be sure to set the lat long coords as they are often a fair bit off.
Just a simple example where Rage4 does not work well: Servers in Sao Paulo, NYC, London, Singapore. Client in Cape Town, goes to which "Closest First" location? :-)
I'm not hating on Rage4, what they do is really cool and generally works extremely well.
Goes by physical distance (hence coords), so Sao Paulo.
@jimpop - just add another record with the IP which suits ZA best and override coordinates.
@rds100 - sure, we can do it, but first tell me how to solve it for such providers as HE.NET, Telia etc (with single, global AS number)? Instead we are planning to let's say "open source" our geolocation databases so the community (like @SplitIce) can update them with correct values