Route53 is a much better alternative to running your own service. I used to have a similar setup for taskup.com and other sites that I'm hosting but for the $0.20 that I pay every month to Amazon, I get weighted DNS responses based on the region that the request comes from and requests get served to the local server for that region, redundancy in 12+ zones, etc. The latency alone for a DNS lookup from India was about 300ms to our server in PA, but now it's under 30ms. Having said that, it's a good learning opportunity.