Can you recommend a third party dns provider that has no cap on max queries per day or has reasonable prices for high traffic sites? Round robin or similar feature is required too.

I will need several 100 thousands of queries per day, 200-300k for sure. I want to run a single domain on several rackshack servers.

I was considering my registrar bulkregister.com but they charge like $30 per 10,000 queries, that is way too expensive

I'd prefer cheap and decent reliable rather than ultra reliable but expensive

www.ultradns.com

Thanks for the info, looks like a good service.

But $0,37 per 1000 queries is still waaay too expensive. That would add up to $3,000 per month.


I forsee problems for my nice plan?

if that's too much money, get a second a server at RackShack, and dedicate it for just DNS -- then you only pay $99 a month.

hmmm guess that's what I gonna have to do

easydns.com or everydns.net

Have you considered using Rackshack's DNS?

jy, easydns won't allow adult, I should have mentioned that mine is...

Looking into everydns, will have to evaluate whether they can/will deal with high traffic domains as is seems to be free / donations based



JG, not sure if they offer what I need (one domain on more than 1 server, round robin). I was somewhat sure they won't, wihtout actually looking? Will check it out, that would be nice...

How would this scenario work out with my current 2 servers at rackshack

One domain on both servers

Server 1 runs ns1.mydomain.com
plus the domain

Server 2 runs ns2.mydomain.com
plus the domain


a) What will happen if one of those 2 servers goes down

b) what will happen if only the nameserver on one of these servers goes down?

Will I loose 50% of the traffic, 100% or none?

Originally posted by Erich
How would this scenario work out with my current 2 servers at rackshack

One domain on both servers

Server 1 runs ns1.mydomain.com
plus the domain

Server 2 runs ns2.mydomain.com
plus the domain


a) What will happen if one of those 2 servers goes down

b) what will happen if only the nameserver on one of these servers goes down?

Will I loose 50% of the traffic, 100% or none?

If both servers go down, you will loose all traffic (ofcourse).

If only one goes down, what happens will depend strictly on how you set up the DNS. If you setup for example 2 A-records that round-robin traffic between your two servers, and have no system in place for removing the A-record when a server crashed, then you will loose 50% of the traffic.

If you instead setup your system with a low TTL and have ns1 serve an A-record for the ns1 server, and similarly have ns2 serve only the A-record for the ns2 server - then you will loose 0% of the traffic in the scenario that one of them crashes. It won't give you as good load balancing in normal operation however.

What I don't grasp is, that the DNS services you have been looking at are so damn expensive. You sound like 300k queries a day is "extremely high", even though it amounts to only 2 - 4 queries per second in average. We give out DNS for free to domains getting 20 - 40 times that amout of queries.

Meanwhile I've found one (zoneedit.com) that would charge $350 for 100 million queries if prepaid. That would be o.k. for me but nonetheless I like the idea of doing that on myself on my two servers as it would open more possibilities to scale the whole setup for just the rackshack costs.

I installed webmin and it looks as if I could go from there. There seems to be everything I need.

What TTL would you recommend (I think usual is about 240?) and can you tell me what the effect of a shorter TTL would be?

Originally posted by Erich
Meanwhile I've found one (zoneedit.com) that would charge $350 for 100 million queries if prepaid. That would be o.k. for me but nonetheless I like the idea of doing that on myself on my two servers as it would open more possibilities to scale the whole setup for just the rackshack costs.

I installed webmin and it looks as if I could go from there. There seems to be everything I need.

What TTL would you recommend (I think usual is about 240?) and can you tell me what the effect of a shorter TTL would be?

I don't think the usual is 240 at all, no. The usual would probably be something like 86400 or similar. You would ofcourse change that depending on the current situation (i.e. lower it a day before doing updates) - or keep it lower if you need to make changes often.

The effect of a shorter TTL is that changes propagate quicker; but it also means that your DNS server will get more queries.

Thanks a lot, I'll try that...