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Comment by nbpoole | Hacker News Reader

Some previous discussion on this issue (almost 2 years ago):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2443710

I'll say the same thing I said then:

As an anecdotal counterpoint, I'm an extremely happy Name.com customer. I transfered several domains to them a year or so ago from GoDaddy. They support two-factor authentication, their interface is uncluttered, I pay them less money than I paid GoDaddy, and I haven't had a single issue. I would highly recommend them to anyone looking for a registrar.

That being said, I don't use them for DNS. If this is a feature of their nameservers, I do find it strange that they don't offer a way to opt out (other than using alternative nameservers).

I am still an incredibly happy Name.com customer and would recommend them as a registrar to anyone who asks. I just would point them somewhere else for DNS hosting.

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May I ask where do you do your DNS hosting ? Do you host it yourself ? Or do you use a third party ?

for domains I'm actively using, I use Route53. For domains I'm not actively using, I don't mind name.com is parking.

For anyone who doesn't want to park inactive domains, you can just remove a domain's nameservers, and users will just get a DNS error. (NXDOMAIN)

I didn't mind name.com parking my domains either.

I do mind the idea of them treating ever possible 3LD as a parked domain, when my domain is not parked (and configured using their Name Servers).

The hosting companies I've used (eg: Linode, Dreamhost for smaller projects) all provide DNS services. I trust them to manage a DNS infrastructure more than I trust myself.

I don't quite understand why people have this allergy to running their own DNS. If you just want a single text file and don't need anything major, dnsmasq will serve records out of /etc/hosts. Slightly up the chain in terms of power, MaraDNS lets you use a text file, and finally there's PowerDNS (which I use) lets you use SQL databases, embed Lua, or read from a pipe. (Being able to use a regular RDBMS is nice for things like writing a little cron job to do your own dynamic DNS, or doing self-service hosting for people.)

If you've never done it, it is a couple of hours of reading and fiddling, but very quick if you have set up DNS before. I'm actually a bit curious about why people (even some sysadmins!) tend to spend time clicking on some clunky web interface to update records manually when it's actually easier to do it yourself. (Mail servers, on the other hand...)

A bit surprised not to see Bind mentioned here, as it's a kind of an industry standard.

Personally, I got Bind installed on all my machines, both for DNS zones and resolving. The only exception is my phone, and that is only because I couldn't find a package for it.

For those that do not want to deal with config files, there is also GUIs like gadmin-bind.

Sorry for the omission; I think Bind is actually a bit tricky to configure by comparison to the other three mentioned.

In my case all of my domains are on name.com (and I haven't had a problem with them so far either); for my smaller personal sites the DNS is managed by my shared hosting provider and for others Route 53.

Check out CloudFlare, they provide some great DNS services with some added bonuses.

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