Hi,

I'm thinking of venturing into a business offering dynamic DNS service. Can anyone enlighten me what are the suitable server setup/software required?

My plan is to get a VPS hosting + dynDNS software. I don't mind paying for the software as long as it worths the money. So far I only know of 1 windows-based software, but windows VPS is not common.

Thank you!

http://www.powerdns.com/
http://mydns.bboy.net/

Or you can use BIND along with nsupdate to dynamically update the zones. You'll need at least two disparate servers, though, and some way to tell the secondary which zones it needs to server. Nobody is going to pay you for DNS service that doesn't provide at least two geographically disparate servers, especially when there are established services that do this for free.

Thanks!

(1) disparate servers means physically disparate or different IPs?

(2) What is the bandwidth requirement for DDNS service? If it's not demanding I will offer it free. BTW what's the business model for free DDNS service?

Originally posted by Richard Tan
Thanks!

(1) disparate servers means physically disparate or different IPs?

(2) What is the bandwidth requirement for DDNS service? If it's not demanding I will offer it free. BTW what's the business model for free DDNS service?

Physically disparate. Obviously just having a different IP provides absolutely no resilience against network outages, the machine going down, or pretty much any other failure you can imagine. This isn't such a big deal when all of the content is being hosted from the same server as DNS; if one dies, they all die, but when the content is on different servers, especially with paying customers, they're not going to accept that all of their content depends on a single VPS and infrastructure being up. You should have two separate machines on opposite sides of the continent you intend to service. If you're going for a global market, it'd be a good idea to have at least one machine in a population centre that's not on the same land mass as the rest of them.

I can't imagine it taking a huge amount of bandwidth; DNS queries are quite small, and beyond that the only overhead is for your administration interface. However, the bigger you get, the more bandwidth you'll be using. afraid.org hosts 29,000 zones and gets about 25 million queries daily. If we guess at 128 bytes a query, that's about 3GB of traffic a day, plus overhead. And they've been around for years.

As far as I know, most of them either pay the bills from advertising, or the owners simply accept donations and pay the majority out of their own pocket. Beyond that, I don't know. I imagine most of them are probably just for-fun projects piggybacking on servers doing other things.

Thanks for your reply which is very informative. Maybe I've to do more research on this. Do you happen to know anyone offering turnkey?