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Comment by avb | Hacker News Reader

Any good suggestions for alternative DNS providers?

Instead of putting all of your eggs in (yet another) one basket, for a site with critical availability requirements I would distribute DNS over multiple providers. If any one provider goes down it is less likely to hurt overall site availability.

Yes, multiple DNS providers should be the way to go.

You can use CloudFlare's free plan as DNS-only.

It makes me nervous to rely on something that's a side benefit of a free service.

That said, I've heard Cloudflare's DNS network is faster than many paid alternatives.

DNSMadeEasy, I just posted about them in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7275538

I moved most of my stuff to Route53 awhile back and for the most part I don't regret it.

Pricing doesn't seem too bad. $0.50 for a zone (domain) and $0.50 for a billion queries: http://aws.amazon.com/route53/pricing/

Correction on the queries pricing:

$0.500 per million queries – first 1 Billion queries / month

$0.250 per million queries – over 1 Billion queries / month

Yep. I had been hesitating on moving more domains over to Route53 because I thought the per-zone pricing was fixed at $0.50 per domain, but it actually scales really well. I'm going to move the rest over to Route53 as soon as I have a chance.

We're using Route 53 in production to handle hundreds of millions of queries per month. We're happy with it, and the price is reasonable. Also, service checks with failover is heavenly.

I've considered doing this also!

Yes, Route 53 has been great for me as well. I have my crucial DNS zones hosted there. But all the other stuff was on Namecheap's name servers.

I'll probably continue with that setup, but just make sure my TTL is set fairly high.

We looked at Route 53, but would that make a difference today if your domain is registered at Namecheap?

If Namecheap is down, it does not get redirected.

If you don't use namecheap's dns servers, dns requests for your domain do not go to namecheap for redirection. They don't go to namecheap at all. Your specified dns servers get registered with the top level domain servers.

If you use Route 53, your zone file is still at Namecheap (registrar). Doesn't that still make Namecheap a failure point?

No. The zone file lives on the nameserver (DNS server) which Route 53 provides. Namescheap registers a list of nameservers for your domain with the TLD.

An over simplified example for looking up "news.ycombinator.com":

1. First query the TLD nameserver for all ".com" domains asking for the authoritative nameserver(s) for "ycombinator.com".

2. Next query that nameserver for "news.ycombinator.com".

But, the first entry point is namecheap. The domain is at Namecheap, so it will not find the zone file at Route 53, if Namecheap does not send it there. Right?

No, registrar's are your portal to updating data in TLDs, but those TLDs are each operated separately. .com and .net are operated by Verisign, for example.

We've been stoked with DNSimple.

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