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What are the Benifits of Running Your Own DNS? 98

Posted by Cliff from the efficiency-versus-convenience dept.
baileyjs asks: "I help run a small web development firm, and we are always trying to save money, but not at the cost of service to our customers. We currently purchase DNS services from our ISP, but are looking at getting our own rack. I was going to put some DNS servers there when I saw that Network Solutions offers free DNS. All our of domains (about 150) are currently on Network Solutions, so transfer is not an issue. Why shouldn't I use Network Solutions? Why should I build my own? What reasons, besides 'Network Solutions is Evil', can I give my boss?"
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What are the Benifits of Running Your Own DNS? More

What are the Benifits of Running Your Own DNS?

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  • Speed of Service (Score:4, Informative)

    by Saac ( 21743 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:18PM (#8840239) Homepage
    I don't know how good customer service is at Network Solutions, but our ISP was taking over 24 hours to process our change requests. This was unacceptable to us. So we roll our own.

    The downside is that you have to make sure these machines are secure, hence there is an overhead to it all.

  • Do Both (Score:5, Informative)

    by linuxwrangler ( 582055 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:22PM (#8840287)
    I'm actually moving the other way - toward hosted DNS. This is especially important if you only have one data line - dual DNS is useless if both servers are on the same connection (just ask Microsoft - that's why they ended up outsourcing theirs a couple of years ago after a big DNS problem).

    But sometimes it's great to be able to do quick changes for test/development and such so you can either delegate a sub-domain that you run internally or you can set up a test/dev domain and run your own DNS for that one.
    • If you only have 1 server or connection being able to resolve the IP does little good when it or your line is down.

      • Re:Do Both (Score:3, Informative)

        by vlm ( 69642 ) *
        Except that email sent to you will bounce with a message similar to:
        "no MX record exists"
        whereas if your DNS was up while your mailserver was unreachable, the sending mailserver would spool the message and retry at various intervals until it went thru, with no error messages generated.

        This is another one of those "ask slashdot" questions that summarize to, read the oreilly book...

        • Except that email sent to you will bounce with a message similar to: "no MX record exists" whereas if your DNS was up while your mailserver was unreachable, the sending mailserver would spool the message and retry at various intervals until it went thru, with no error messages generated.

          If all the DNS servers for your domain are unreachable, then any MTA I know of will consider it a temporary failure and keep trying. This is completely different from successfully performing a DNS query and being told t

    • I think this is the best method too. The biggest upside to using the hosted DNSes is speed of propagation. It's nice to have local control, but anyone who has had to update a DNS knows the pain of not getting that update to occur for the customer because thier ISP doesn't get updates fast enough. The further you can get your changes upstream, the better off you are.

      • I think this is the best method too. The biggest upside to using the hosted DNSes is speed of propagation. It's nice to have local control, but anyone who has had to update a DNS knows the pain of not getting that update to occur for the customer because thier ISP doesn't get updates fast enough. The further you can get your changes upstream, the better off you are.

        This makes no sense. DNS propagates on demand only - it's not as if changes suddenly start flowing across the net on their own from high gro

    • Re:Do Both (Score:3, Informative)

      by Bitsy Boffin ( 110334 )

      This is especially important if you only have one data line - dual DNS is useless if both servers are on the same connection
      secondary.org [secondary.org] provides free secondary DNS for anybody who wants it. I have them as secondary on a couple of domains I host on my cable and it's all good.

      • I personally found secondary.org didn't pick up my dns records terribly well. I found twisted4life.com [twisted4life.com] did a much better job.

        twisted4life offers secondary dns for 10 domains free, and lets you pay for more.

  • Use dyndns (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    DYNDNS [dyndns.org]

    Instant changes

  • 'Instant' Changes (Score:2, Informative)

    by stu42j ( 304634 )
    One of the advantages of having your own DNS servers is that you can reload the master server whenever you makes changes to your zone files. IOW, changes are pretty much instant instead of the 24-48 hours common with other providers.

    Of course there are other issues that will delay the propogation of your changes but with things like adding a new subdomain there is no delay. (Always be sure to increment your serial! :)

    The other reason we use our own DNS is so that additions can be automatically handled t

  • Netsol costs more. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Inoshiro ( 71693 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:25PM (#8840328) Homepage
    For a pithy 150 domains, setup TinyDNS. It takes about 20 minutes to download/compile/install. There are plenty of helpful guides [kuro5hin.org] to setting up the software.

    If you are unsure about the format, use a zone-xfer to get them to TinyDNS format. Then your DNS is 100% under your control (easy updating!), cost effective (TinyDNS needs to maintenance), and has a light impact on the server (usually 1 second of CPU time for every few days + a few hundred kb of HD space). On top of that, you can transfer your registrations to an alternative registrar (like Joker) which would be cheaper in the long run.
    • I agree with you. I am adminstering a DNS server for my univ and it so happened that even before I could get my hands on BIND I was introduced to TinyDNS by some holy soul. Installing and configuring it is a cakewalk.

      Then someday I had to configure BIND. I went crazy. It's got so many unnecessary things that you need to look into....

      TinyDNS rocks.

      Nandz.
    • Pithy domains? Would a pithy domain be higher ranked by google than it's more run of the mill domains?

    • Re:Netsol costs more. (Score:2, Informative)

      by TaraByte ( 660047 )
      http://djbdnsrocks.com/ [djbdnsrocks.com] is another great resource

    • Re:Netsol costs more. (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I also use TinyDNS [tinydns.org], and others of the DJBDNS tools.

      • It is safer than BIND
      • It is simpler than BIND
      • It includes a tool for restarting if there is a problem (not that I've seen any other than my own errors)

  • vendor independence (Score:3, Informative)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:26PM (#8840333) Homepage Journal
    Network Solutions may be evil. Network Solutions is expensive. If you decide to rely on them for DNS, then you are installing yet another obstacle stopping you from switching to a different registration service.

    On the other hand, many other registration services also offer included DNS, so it's not that big of a deal.

    Personally, I would probably use the "free" service that you already overpaid for. I would also switch to a less expensive company for future registrations and renewals.

  • Remember backup DNS. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MindStalker ( 22827 ) <mindstalker@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:27PM (#8840351) Journal
    I'd recommend you set up your own DNS and use network solutions as the backup DNS.
    Remember that the backup DNS really shouldn't be geographically located near the primary. Even though 9/10 they are on the same network sadly.
    • Remember that the backup DNS really shouldn't be geographically located near the primary. Even though 9/10 they are on the same network sadly.

      Yes, it would be terrible if your network is down and people weren't able to resolve your hostnames in order to connect to your web servers which are also down. Really, what's the point of that unless you have multiple geographically diverse webservers as well?

      • Re:Remember backup DNS. (Score:4, Informative)

        by DA-MAN ( 17442 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:41PM (#8841149) Homepage
        Remember that the backup DNS really shouldn't be geographically located near the primary. Even though 9/10 they are on the same network sadly.

        Yes, it would be terrible if your network is down and people weren't able to resolve your hostnames in order to connect to your web servers which are also down. Really, what's the point of that unless you have multiple geographically diverse webservers as well?

        The Web is not the internet, when will people get this? It's very cheap to pay a hosting company a monthly fee to provide a backup mail server to spool when your primary is down. Secondary NS's should be available if the primary goes down if just to keep mail working properly.

        In addition, there are many free services out there like GraniteCanyon that will host your secondary ns for free. So there really isn't a reason to do it wrong.
        • It's very cheap to pay a hosting company a monthly fee to provide a backup mail server to spool when your primary is down. Secondary NS's should be available if the primary goes down if just to keep mail working properly.

          Practically every mail server on the planet will keep retrying delivery for several days. Unless you have complete control over your secondary MX's configuration, in particular its anti-spam configuration, and the secondary MX has an alternate path to your users you're better off without
          • "In either case, the original point was: there's no real point in backup DNS unless the services you reach via DNS also have suitable backups."

            There may be no point to *you* in that situation, but for every other server or client that needs to connect to a resource on your domain, each and every single lookup that has to go to the zone's authoritative nameservers will cost the requestor to wait for a timeout. From the point of view of "well, they can't get to my stuff anyway, 'cause it's all down", sure,

        • What's the point of a secondary dns to keep mail working properly if the mail server is probably sitting right next to the primary DNS? If the first location gets whacked, the mail still has no place to go.
          • What's the point of a secondary dns to keep mail working properly if the mail server is probably sitting right next to the primary DNS? If the first location gets whacked, the mail still has no place to go.

            Had you not read my post? I had clearly stated that:
            It's very cheap to pay a hosting company a monthly fee to provide a backup mail server to spool when your primary is down.

            If e-mail is important to you, there really isn't a reason why you can't have two dns servers on different networks. It's cheap
        • Agreed. People just don't get it. Secondary DNS at a different location is important. For example, what happens if your primary DNS is down and your mail server is unavailable? Mail queues up. When things come back on line, mail starts flowing again. What happens if your primary and seconday are in the same location and your link goes down? Other sites can't look up your name at all and mail starts bouncing. Huge difference.
      • How about "yes, it would be terrible if your poorly-architected DNS setup meant that all authoritative nameservers for your domain(s) were down and every query made to them for web browsing and smtp connections throughtout the internet had to endure a wait until the request timed out."

        I made the same statement that you did once, before I was enlightened by an old-timer on the BIND-users mailing list.

        • Some time ago, I added a caching DNS server to our firewall, without mentioning it to anyone on the LAN. I immediately got a bunch of comments on how the Internet had suddenly gotten a lot faster. Happy users aren't to be discounted.

          Of course, much of the reason was the poor performance of the ISP's name servers. I think they're better now, but they're still not very fast. I've found I can get better response with several name servers that are farther away. For example, I mentioned it to an admin for
      • Really, what's the point of that unless you have multiple geographically diverse webservers as well?

        As mentioned, Internet != web. Even there, though, it's the difference between "this server seems to be down" and "there is no evidence that this server exists". If I'm having a problem with my server, then at least would-be visitors have an indication that a website should be at its address and will hopefully try again later.

        • As mentioned, Internet != web. Even there, though, it's the difference between "this server seems to be down" and "there is no evidence that this server exists". If I'm having a problem with my server, then at least would-be visitors have an indication that a website should be at its address and will hopefully try again later.

          Sadly, Internet Explorer conceals this very salient difference, so 90% of people have never had the distinction enter their field of consideration.

  • Control, speed, and more. (Score:3, Informative)

    by toygeek ( 473120 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:27PM (#8840356) Journal
    I currently work for a web hosting firm where we run our own DNS of course. Its not without its problems, for sure. But as long as you know what you're doing, or know where to go for help, its pretty easy and worth doing.

    I run my own DNS for my personal server, so that I can make changes and they are instant to me, since I configured my Winders XP box to reference my server for DNS.

    There are lots of neat things you can do by running your own but personally I like it because you can run hundreds of domains off of one small box that has some decent memory in it, and it won't go down unless there is hardware failure.

    So, in my opinion, if you have the resources, then there is no reason NOT to. Go for it!

  • We used to host our own... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Talonius ( 97106 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:28PM (#8840362)
    ...until it just plain become a huge PITA with little return.

    I can't think of a reason to host your own corporate DNS. For personal DNS - i.e. you browsing the web, etc., you can control timeouts and your queries are processed much faster - but for corporate DNS, outsource it.

    Be afraid of free though. Free generally means no guarantee. Of course NetSol hosts one of the root servers so I guess you'd expect their data lines to be fairly redundant.

    We currently use UltraDNS (http://www.ultradns.net). They've been fantastic and have a terrific interface for making changes. Requires some knowledge but we've *never* had a DNS problem since switching two years ago.

    --T
    • Thanks to BINDisms, the question has to be asked: what component of DNS are you talking about?

      Authoratative server: ie, answering queries for domains you control. The arguments for keeping this in-house are the same as any other mission critical service, not worth restating. If your company outsources critical functions, might as well outsource auth DNS as well.

      Caching server: ie, collecting answers to queries for clients. This is an overlooked critical piece, IMO. Cache poisoning is a real security risk,

    • it just plain become a huge PITA with little return.

      Eh? I run my own. Many of my customers, even small ones, run their own. They tick over quietly, day after day, year after year. I (they) get as much control as I (they) want, instant updates, and a choice of how to specify those updates (hand edit, web form, automated etc). For vanila-flavoured domains the zonefiles are all pretty much identical anyway.

      For outgoing DNS queries, the traffic and time saving through query cacheing is not huge, but it is t

  • Benifits? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Rediculous spelling aside, the main advantage is responsiveness, you loose the ability to make quwik DNS changes when you let someone else do it. That's somethink to think about.

    That said, for all intensive purposes, you shouldent be making arbitrary changes like that anyway, I no for me I could care less how responsive it is as long as DNS changes propogeat within a few hour's.

    • Re:Benifits? (Score:2, Funny)

      by sfjoe ( 470510 )
      That said, for all intensive purposes, ...

      You really shouldn't criticize other's spelling, since for all intents and purposes, it makes you look pedantic.

      • You really shouldn't criticize others' posts, since it makes you look like an idiot who doesn't know what a pedant is.
        • I don't see your point. She/He used pedantic properly.

          A pedant is:
          One who puts on an air of learning; one who makes a vain display of learning; a pretender to superior knowledge.

          In otherwords, typical /. posters are pedants.
          • A pedant is one who displays their learned state in a high-faultin' manner; the parent's parent's parent, being in a decidedly uneducated state, lacks the credentials of a pedant. I would tend towards classifying said person as a poseur.
            • Actually the definition I stated came directly from a dictionary. Being a pedant means to act educated. However, I see your point, because it is often only used to describe people who are actually educated, but I would suggest that even a moron can be pedantic. Infact, it is offten those who know the least who want to make the most of it. I would think that the majority of pedants are hardly intellegent themselves.

              Everyone knows something, even an idiot, and to be pedantic is simply to show off what y
        • He's right, look it up [reference.com], it's not as if that takes more than ten seconds or anything. OTOH, both the OP (and his horrible typing to match his horrible shallowness of understanding of English) and your parent are being pedants:
          1. One who pays undue attention to book learning and formal rules.
          2. One who exhibits one's learning or scholarship ostentatiously.
          3. Obsolete. A schoolmaster.

          I think my GP should have said catachrestic [reference.com], which would both have been more correct and more interesting, as well as letting you

          • Jesus fucking Christ, there's one everywhere, isn't there?

            Try reading the whole thread, then take your trolling crap elsewhere. I do know what a pedant is, but you don't seem to understand that without a foundation it's a hard climb to a successful argument, or in this case to the successful application of a word in a sentence.

            I should have expected as much on Slashdot.
            • Try reading the whole thread,

              Done. And...?

              then take your trolling crap elsewhere. I do know what a pedant is, but you don't seem to understand that without a foundation it's a hard climb to a successful argument, or in this case to the successful application of a word in a sentence.

              Loser's limp if ever I saw it. (-:
      • "For all intensive purposes" is a common playful pun on the phrase "for all intents and purposes." Which, if you were not aware, is a phrase, and is not the only thing which can be used in any particular situation.

        Also, while we're at it, you mean "others'."

  • You'd have more control over DNS if you managed it in house. You'd be able to decide maintennace scheduling, patching, etc. You'd also direct control over hardware and configuration needs. If there's anything you'd want to research, it would be TCO for in house vs a DNS provider. You might also want to see if you can find statistics relating to performance, uptime, reliability, etc of in house vs provider for DNS.
  • You'll need at least two boxes running in different locations. But you can have multiple dns records pointing at the same boxes. So a surfer looks up your site, tries record 1 on box 1, then record 2 on box 2, then record 3 perhaps on box 1 again. In other words, even if box 1 and 2 are offline temporarilly perhaps the 3rd - 6th attempts will succeed. Now, say you wanted to do some network re-configuration. Having the DNS under your control allows you to set the TTL or time-to-live on the records to ver

  • Benefits of hosting DNS (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mnmn ( 145599 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:36PM (#8840456) Homepage
    For one, you can have as many lines and zones as you want. Which means you can have many subdomains and many subsubdomains. Hosting providers usually put a cap, and I've seen some caps are horrific (only 5 subdomains).

    I am hosting 7 domains, and 2 of the domains have 20 subdomains each. A friend on a different ISP hosts my secondary and I host his. Quite honestly, with a static IP, you dont really need DNS services at all, unless youre virtualhosting, in which case self-hosting DNS is best since you send out zones once, and just leave it there. They only change when you edit the zones.

    Running BIND on a static IP server and not changing anything has low overhead, and it doesnt take much skill or time. However if youre only hosting 2 domains, not too many subdomains, usually the hosting providers offer a basic DNS service for free. Might as well use that till you hit their cap.
  • We have many technically clueless clients. We provide DNS and domain regirstration for them at a slight markup and small monthly expense. They think they're getting a huge bargain and it takes us almost no time and resources. Our colo provider and office ISP (different companies) both provide secondary for free, so we have servers on different nets. A win for everybody.

  • Advantages (Score:3, Funny)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:07PM (#8840744) Homepage Journal

    The possibilities are limitless.

    Imagine having the ability to provide your customers with customized pointers to

    mycompetitor.com
    You can point them to your own range of services, or to a clumsy-looking buck-toothed site "Doh! We're dorks!".

    And that doesn't even begin to enumerate the lucrative possibilities of being a window to various on-line casinos and to paypal...

  • just insecure, slow, and not trustworthy.
  • There are some comments here about the benefits of having a DNS server in your home. It's peripheral to the main topic, but since I've seen this mentioned in some other threads, could someone elaborate on this? What are the benefits? What is the best way to implement this with minor maintenance? What experiences have y'all had this this?

    • Re:Home DNS? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by sd3 ( 756787 )

      I started running DNS at home when all I had was a desktop PC and a dialup PPP connection. To tell the truth, I forget exactly why I felt it necessary to start running it, but now that there are (ahem) considerably more than one computer in the house, DNS is indispensible. You asked about benefits?

      • Only have to maintain one set of name tables, not N copies of a hosts file (even with two machines it gets annoying)
      • Makes internal DHCP a lot easier for about the same reason
      • Can carve out your own section o
      • And squid would allow you to setup access lists / blocks MUCH easier if you have kids. There are also some pretty neat squid reporting tools to allow better monitoring of the "kids"
    • I implemented BIND on our home network. I personally didn't think it was all that tricky, though figuring out how to get DHCP to dynamically update the DNS took a little bit. Now, whenever we turn on a machine on the network (laptop, desktop, whatever) the hostname is automagically registered in DNS. It's a caching server, so generally it speeds up DNS queries quite a bit. The ISPs servers sucked for quite some time, so setting up our own DNS server we bypassed all that.

      Best way to implement is to ge

    • By and large, one of the simplest DNS features to use on a home or home-office level is a DNS caching server. It usually involves setting up a full-blown DNS server (Micro$soft, BIND, etc.), but you can configure it to only cache DNS entries you've requested. You'll instantly see a return on that endeavor by not having to always seek out your ISP's DNS servers (which can be down, slow, under attack, whatever) for name resolution.

      Then, configure your internal DHCP or IP configurations to use your interna

  • Unlike what some people are saying speed is not a reason to roll your own dns. If you managed your own dns then on your network you'll probably see changes instantly but your changes are still going to take 1 day to a week to go through everyone else's caching dns. I'd assume you want to see the same data as your customers. The main reason to choose is failover; if you can have two systems for dns at different locations on different network connections then you *can* do it yourself if you want. Otherwise un

    • Re:Speed is not a reason (Score:5, Informative)

      by Webmonger ( 24302 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @05:01PM (#8841368) Homepage
      DNS caching is configurable. If you know changes are coming soon, you can change your time-to-live (ttl) to 5 minutes.

      When your new ttl has propogated to everyone, you can make your changes, which will apply in 5 minutes, then restore the old ttl.

      These sorts of changes are not as easy to make with an external DNS provider, though they can be done.
      • you can change your time-to-live (ttl) to 5 minutes.

        Unfortunately many large ISPs ignore the TTL field and update on their own schedule. The result will still be up to a week to update the DNS.

      • Yea, I know but making a modification in preperation to make a modification? I *personally* don't like low ttls just because of the increase in traffic. The only time I would use a low ttl is for using dns to implement web server failover with multi-site, multi-subnet'ed backup web servers. So in that sense being able to specify low ttls would be a reason to roll your own dns.
    • Changning nameservers on a domain will take 48-72 hours but dns is basically going to update after ttl specifies. I've worked for a large web hosting company and the only provider that we saw a cache go over 24 hours with was AOL all the other major ISP did not hold a cache for very long.

  • run your own primary DNS with an off-site 2ndary (Score:5, Informative)

    by chongo ( 113839 ) * on Monday April 12, 2004 @05:02PM (#8841380) Homepage Journal
    Hosting your own DNS server allows you to have full control and maximum flexibility over your domains. But don't forget that you need an off-site secondary DNS server as well!

    You need a secondary DNS in case your site is cutoff from the net (backhoe cuts your cable), or if your ISP has routing/service problems, or if you suffer a loss of power for an extended period of time.

    Loss of DNS service is more than people simply not being able to reach your site, loss of DNS service means EMail bounces (servers return EMail if they can no longer resolve your domain). Loss of DNS service means that web browsers tell your customers that you do not exist instead of simply telling them that you are down / not responding.

    You want a secondary DNS that is located " elsewhere ". You want it far enough away that a single regional disaster (power outages, floods, earthquakes, etc.) does not take out both your primary DNS and your secondary DNS. You want your secondary DNS to have a distinct set of service providers to increase the chance that sites will be able to resolve your domain if the regional network is partitioned.

    Run your own primary DNS. Make it a non-caching, non-forwarding, static, only answers queries for the domains it is authoritative. Then pick 1+ secondary DNS services that will slave off of your DNS master keeping in mind the points raised above.

    One example of a secondary DNS Service is BackupDNS [backupdns.com]. They are inexpensive: Secondary DNS hosting your 150 domains would cost $28.50 US per month ($0.19 US per zone per month). They let you be in full control of your DNS service: Their site lets you new add zones, update (purge your zone on their servers and then force an reload) or remove zones on the fly. They will be a backup MX site if you like. They can even grok TSIG to improve the security of zone transfers. The BackupDNS [backupdns.com] folks are clueful, efficient, reliable and (unlike NetSol/Verisign) non-evil. I'm sure there are other secondary DNS Services that are both clueful, inexpensive. I mention these folks because we have had years of flawless secondary DNS service from them.

    To sum it all up: Run a primary DNS to maximize the control and flexibility over your own domains. Use a clueful off-site secondary DNS service to maximize the chance that others will be able to resolve your domain.

  • Once you get the basics down, it is trivial to host your own DNS listings. The primary advantages, as far as I have been able to determine are:
    1) I don't ever have to rely on someone else's DNS listing being accurate OR up
    2) I can make changes and they are immediately propagated to my entire LAN
    3) ability to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks

    Malachi
  • Why even bother with DNS? You can just use IP addresses, and it doesn't cost you a thing. No hosting or anything. With google, and bookmarks, hardly anyone bothers typing URLs anyway. Those that do can get by with an IP address. IPv4 addresses aren't that much to remeber anyway.
    • Are you suggesting he hosts sites for his clients on ips and forgoes domains, I'm sure he'll get alot of business like that, besides the fact you can only host one site per ip. He'll be getting horrible use out of his ip pool.
      • you can only host one site per ip

        You have to be joking me. You can easily put each site in its own subdirectory and host as many sites as you want. I mean I meant my post as a joke, but come on it could work if you really wanted it to.

        The real reason to use dns isn't the fancy names, it is the location transparency the domain name offers. You can change IPs when ever you want (accounting for the delays in DNS propagation of course), and all you have to do is make the dns entry point to the new IP.

  • One big advantage is you can set your root servers to something other than the Verisign monopoly. For your users than you can transparently connect to those weird sites that don't end in .com. Not helpful if you are only hosting websites, but if you have users using your server it is important.

  • You should check these out too, some are free, others cost but are cheap, give you web interfaces to manage your own DNS

    FREE
    http://www.everydns.net/
    http://www.dyndn s.org

    For pay
    http://www.easydns.com/dnsmanage.php3
    http:/ /www.ultradns.com/
  • There's more to DNS than A records. Ask if NS
    will let you do DDNS, SRV records, or dynamic SRV.
  • For me the decision to handle my own DNS boiled down to the principle of self-sufficiency. Why pay/trust someone to do something I could do myself. When I first started hosting, I used Granite Canyon's free service, but became disillusioned with it when they had a prolonged outage. I figured I could handle it at least as well, so I did. (Which is how I got into hosting in the first place.) I like the control and immediacy of having my own stuff.

    Now Register.com offers DNS with domains registered thro

  • I run our DNS locally in our shop. I can't imagine having it any other way. We run BIND on Suse and it is so very convenient.
  • I have my own running on my OpenBSD firewall. Does DNS for my LAN and is the DNS for my website.

    You control your own DNS, you can control all the sub-domains for free, manage them however and whenever you want, and I think the lag time is smaller from when you make the change and when it actually works (probably not, but you could tell your boss that... time is money, afterall.... right?)

    The only problem I can see is getting someone to manage the 150+ domains. But if you current staff is capable, then I s
  • My need is smaller than yours.. just a couple personal domains for my various mail & hosting needs. But, the concept is the same.

    I started out doing my own DNS. I wanted the flexibility and complete control of running it myself. After diligently updating bind versions for a long time, I missed one. A 1337 h4x0r quickly exploited my system. Luckily, he was dumb enough to reboot the box, and broadcasted a message saying "you are owned". Yup, time for an OS re-install.

    I tried a cheap DNS hosting

  • Another option that hasn't been fully covered in this thread is the notion of running a stealth primary.

    We have a lot of users who run a primary nameserver but never list it as an authoritative nameserver in the DNS. Then they use someone (yes, like us, or anyone...) to pull secondary from them.

    This way they control their zone and TTLs but if they are running their nameserver off one machine or a DSL line or something and it goes down all of their DNS servers are still operating and serving data.

    It's a
  • A lot of people are mentioning DYNDNS and other free dns servers(no-ip.com is my favorite). Most if not all of these use the berkeley dns servers, which is free and updates instantly. but because these Servers are so available and widley used, perhaps a few other reasons, they are prone to DDoS attacks. I've used these for years, and I've only noticed a few times when the service wasn't working. But on a corporate scale, it's probably better to get the garuantee from a host that costs money.
  • I use a site called EveryDNS [http://www.everydns.net/] and have found them to be very good. Allow all manner of changes to records plus have 4 DNS servers not all in the same area. Read as failover. David and David have spent some time putting together a good usable system. You can even have Dynamic DNS services.
    They are others like Zoneedit but EveryDNS is free or donation based. I've not had a single problem with any of the domains I have with them.

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