An Engineer's Guide to DNS | Hacker News Reader

An Engineer's Guide to DNS

developer.yahoo.net

97 pointssh1mmer13 comments

"The DNS hosting service typically thrown in for free by domain registrars is not very good. For most sites, solid DNS hosting costs about $USD 50 per year. It's worth the effort. Heck, set up with two different services for failover."

Can anyone recommend a company that provides solid DNS hosting? Are there measurable performance benefits? Thanks!

I could not put it in the article, but for my personal projects I use worldwidedns.net and mtgsy.com. I've also used DNSPark.net but their admin interface is nasty.

Well I can't speak for all domain registrar DNS services, but I've had nothing but great experiences with the free DNS service at Namecheap. It's a nice interface, very configurable, and the updates are fast.

There can definitely be benefits to the very important first visit to a site, particularly if you have a lot of subdomains (images, static, movies, whatever) that need to be resolved. The faster they resolve the faster the site will seem. Unfortunately I can't make any recommendations.

When I looked into this a few years ago dyndns.com was a good affordable service.

dnsmadeeasy.com

ultradns.com - fast, reliable, scalable

Absurdly expensive.

'It's hard to observe the DNS directly yet it exerts an obscure, pervasive influence without which everything would fly apart'

They're right, but a tip: dnstrace is brilliant for doing exactly that.

I like dnstracer better: http://www.mavetju.org/unix/dnstracer.php

dnstracer is actually the tool I meant, oops.

Easy to get confused (especially since from an end user [but not backend] point of view, they're both similar to traceroute).

A minor irritant: using "the DNS" rather than merely "DNS" (but NOT in the title!). I find that somewhat distracting. Examples:

" It's hard to observe the DNS..."

"Using the DNS is often compared to..."

When should "the DNS" ("the domain name system") become "DNS"? Should it?

I'm currently reading: Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought". My apologies for unshouldering this heavy linguistic burden.

Yeah, it bothered me too. :) I was trying to get across that I was talking about a singular world-spanning entity instead of some abstract protocol. I'm not sure of the real grammar rules.

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