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Is it worthing paying for a "premium" DNS service?
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Is it worthing paying for a "premium" DNS service?

Can anyone tell me if it's worth paying for a premium DNS hosting for a website where speed and uptime are critical, with a primarily US-based audience?

I have a website that currently uses Namecheap's free DNS servers, and I'm wondering if paying for something like ClouDNS would be worthwhile. This is unfortunately an area where I have little knowledge.

I also considered hosting my own DNS servers, but it seems like more trouble than it's worth.

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Comments

  • GM2015GM2015 Member
    edited August 2015

    Don't want to sound like I like to kiss cloudflare's ass, but the two dns servers my site is on has almost zero dns look up time according to pingdom tools.pingdom./fpt. Much faster than digitalocean's servers. DO servers usually took 0.1-0.4 s to lookup on pingdom. PITA.

  • It's a couple of years old now, but this page has some nice overview of what's going on. http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2012/08/comparison-and-analysis-of-managed-dns.html

    There's clearly a few providers out there who can typically serve DNS requests in the ~50ms area.

    Availability is obviously of high importance.

    Other than that there's been research that consistenly correlates 'abandonment' (of sites and shopping carts) with higher load times. People are extremely impatient online, so whatever you're hosting you're likely to see some marginal gains if you can shave off a few ms in people discovering your IP via DNS. It will be a small margin though.

  • Is there anything wrong with Namecheap's DNS services? If not, I don't see why you should switch other than requiring additional services.

  • ricardo said: People are extremely impatient online, so whatever you're hosting you're likely to see some marginal gains if you can shave off a few ms in people discovering your IP via DNS. It will be a small margin though.

    People generally don't notice a difference in ms. Besides, DNS queries are usually cached by the provider anyway, so trying to speed things up DNS-wise seems like one of the things you should optimize last.

  • ricardoricardo Member
    edited August 2015

    I somewhat agree on the 'optimize last' part but,

    People generally don't notice a difference in ms.

    Your eye sees 60 frames a second. It's noticeable, + what I mentioned about abandonment. Getting 1/10th of a second back is useful, for every hostname that'll be touched.

    Some fodder on page load speed and conversions: http://blog.radware.com/applicationdelivery/applicationaccelerationoptimization/2013/05/case-study-page-load-time-conversions/

    Extremely quick websites always leave a good impression with me.

    I guess for latency it's all about adding up the small wins. Availability is probably the better selling point of the paid services.

  • @ricardo said:
    I somewhat agree on the 'optimize last' part but,

    I guess for latency it's all about adding up the small wins. Availability is probably the better selling point of the paid services.

    It's also important if the site needs to be loaded multiple times (e.g. a forum). No one wants to use a slow forum. (granted browser caching helps a lot, but still)

  • I always used the registrar's DNS servers. Never noticed problems..

  • jhjh Member

    Unless you need failover or an API, probably not worth it.

    I had a customer a couple of years back who ignored this advice. His funds were short but he fell for a "managed" DNS hosting company's sales pitch and forked out for it. I asked him what part was "managed" and in his mind it meant they'd add the records for him if he asked them by email. He also said that their service was apparently the fastest and this would somehow affect his SEO and conversion rates (because DNS makes up a massive part of page load times...).

    About a month later, we caught up. It turned out that they had "lost" all of his DNS records and he had a lot of downtime while he switched it back to his own server. I said, "but wasn't it managed?"

    Thanked by 14n0nx
  • Don't need. It gets cached by most major DNS servers anyway, right?

  • lol, 1 guy chooses bad provider... empirical evidence.

    Don't need. It gets cached by most major DNS servers anyway, right?

    Sure, bearing in mind the TTL.

    Look at LET's DNS. It takes 40ms with a TTL of 300 seconds. Pretty good. If you visit once an hour for most days of the year you'll be spending 2 minutes of your life in those fleeting moments waiting for it to load. If it took 200ms that's 10 minutes.

    That's just one website.

  • jhjh Member
    edited August 2015

    ricardo said: lol, 1 guy chooses bad provider... empirical evidence.

    If you meant my post, then no, that was an anecdote, not a serious example to be generalised.

    My serious comment was that most people don't need a fancy DNS service.

  • 4n0nx4n0nx Member
    edited August 2015

    ricardo said: Sure, bearing in mind the TTL.

    Look at LET's DNS. It takes 40ms with a TTL of 300 seconds. Pretty good. If you visit once an hour for most days of the year you'll be spending 2 minutes of your life in those fleeting moments waiting for it to load. If it took 200ms that's 10 minutes.

    That's just one website.

    You are going to have to contact a DNS server every once in a while, unless you permanently cache the records locally. So I'd say if the user does not want to query the Google DNS for 5 milliseconds, they should start caching. The website owner can't do it for them.

  • ricardoricardo Member
    edited August 2015

    I guess it's up to the OP @stab to be more specific then.

    It is definitely a 1%er thing.

    You are going to have to contact a DNS server every once in a while, unless you permanently cache the records locally. So I'd say if the user does not want to query the Google DNS for 5 milliseconds, they should start caching. The website owner can't do it for them.

    Not sure why you said that.

    As an aside, there are still a lot of programs 'out there' that perform DNS lookups synchronously.

  • stabstab Member

    I'm maintaining a website that doesn't get a huge amount of traffic (10,000 visitors a day) but I try to have it as fast as possible and it's extremely important that it is. I'm running HHVM/Varnish/memcached already so ~99% of hits are coming straight from RAM cache, and I'm looking at DNS as something else to optimize.

    To me it's worth paying a little extra for faster performance and reliability, but I'm trying to figure out if makes a big enough difference to.

  • Are you using a CDN?

    IMO, I'd go for a paid DNS provider if you feel it provides the value you need. Personally I'd think about it when there's commercial gain, though perfection and/or user satisfaction are things to enjoy. There'll certainly be a time saving to be had for you & your visitors.

    Amazon charge something like 50 cents per million queries. I've no recommendations though I've done a bit reading up on these services lately, as I need some extra DNS services for my own stuff.

  • ricardo said: Look at LET's DNS. It takes 40ms with a TTL of 300 seconds. Pretty good. If you visit once an hour for most days of the year you'll be spending 2 minutes of your life in those fleeting moments waiting for it to load. If it took 200ms that's 10 minutes.

    Assuming your ISP respects 5-minute TTLs for A/AAAA records. Quite a few will transparently rewrite those to 3600 seconds... or longer.

    And stupidly short TTLs are pretty uncommon. If LET had a more sensible 14400-second TTL, your example case would amount to all of twelve seconds a year spent waiting.

  • Awmusic12635Awmusic12635 Member, Host Rep

    Honestly, just use cloudflare. There DNS is stable, fast and free.

  • Can I use cloudflare as secondary? – Because I am using DNSSEC.

  • @shafire said:
    Can I use cloudflare as secondary? – Because I am using DNSSEC.

    No cloudflare wants to be primary or nothing at all. At least it was the last time I checked. I did see a blog post about DNSSEC back in January, but that's probably still in closed beta.

  • sinsin Member

    I've tried out different dns providers and I always end up sticking with Cloudflare's free DNS, it's just that damn fast.

  • I use a mix of free and paid. Paid for 'mission critical' stuff, the few bucks I pay a month for Route53 seems to be worth it. Everything else is on CloudFlare or my shared host's DNS which has been rock solid for 4-5 years.

  • stabstab Member

    I did test out Amazon's CloudFront CDN, and ironically it made my site take longer to load according to testing tools. Whether or not that's accurate, I don't know. It could have been my implementation, maybe I need to try it again.

    I'm still trying to figure out if a paid DNS service is worthwhile though.

  • sinsin Member

    stab said: I'm still trying to figure out if a paid DNS service is worthwhile though.

    Have you seen this website? http://www.solvedns.com/dns-comparison/

    It gives different reports of lots of dns providers.

    Thanked by 3GM2015 stab ricardo
  • I thought about this a month or two ago when Namecheap's DNS servers were DDoSed. My web server was up, my hosted email was up, but none of that mattered since the name resolution was down for as long as it would take. (Namecheap does not support replicating zones to secondary, third-party DNS servers).

    I still haven't figured out the right solution for my needs, but it is definitely clear that not all DNS providers - free or paid - are created equal.

  • Just don't use Digitalocean's default nameservers because they are terrible.

    jemaltz said: I still haven't figured out the right solution for my needs, but it is definitely clear that not all DNS providers - free or paid - are created equal.

  • stabstab Member

    @sin said:

    Thanks for that, this is a very interesting site.

    Surprisingly, it shows that Cloudflare's free DNS is the #3 fastest overall. And namecheap's servers historically have ~95% uptime, which sounds absurdly bad.

  • doghouchdoghouch Member
    edited August 2015

    Well, CloudFlare has 10,000% SLA on their Enterprise plan, so... meh

  • stabstab Member

    I tried to give Amazon's DNS a try, and it looks like Namecheap's DNS immediately stops responding to DNS lookups as soon as you switch.

    How brutally annoying and reason enough for me to not use them anymore.

  • Leaving the fact that they might not be cheap, I'd set a testbox and see how good they are.
    https://aws.amazon.com/route53/?nc1=h_ls

    Keep us posted .

  • vfusevfuse Member, Host Rep

    Solvedns publishes monthly reports with DNS speed comparisons. Cloudflare almost always comes up in the top 3 of fastest resolve times, and they're free.

    I've used namecheap's dns service about 5 years ago, can't really say how it's like now but I did have downtime cause of their DNS back when I used them.

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