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

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

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 r

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

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

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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 enj

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/m

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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'

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?