I run 2 (soon to be 3) sun boxes. Over the years I've become an "almost competent administrator". The only request I send to my current provider are dns requests. There have been problems getting these done in a timely manner, and I've had at lease two occasions where a requested "restore" could not be done because of a flawed backup.

I'm going through the pain of selecting another colo provider and need help deciding what to do about dns. The biggest problem I face now, is that I have hundreds of domains that point to the colo's nameservers. Part of the switch will involve updating registrar records. No doubt, a not insignificant number of these domains will be at NetSol, and the domain owner will not have the keys to make the change.

Going forward I'm trying to decide (since I've got to endure the pain at lease once) how I want to make these updates.

1) Do my own dns (primary on one box, secondary on another)
2) Outsource my dns but use my names (ns1.mydom.com....)

Since I'm only an "almost competent administrator" I'm not sure I want to take full ownership of this task.

Comments desired:

1) How risky is it to do your own dns (I'm playing with bind 9) on a home box now.

2) How pricey is it to outsource dns?

3) Any recomendations for an outsourced dns provider?

Thanks in advance for your consideration/replys.

Bob

1) How risky is it to do your own dns (I'm playing with bind 9) on a home box now.

Not too risky. Just gotta be real sure that you know your zones and are setting them up correctly.

2) How pricey is it to outsource dns?

Not bad at all. Depening on the number of zones that you have or want will dictate the price. You could also look into getting a old RAQ2 for like $30-$50 a month and doing unlimited zones through there on a colo.

3) Any recomendations for an outsourced dns provider?

I would use a actual ISP/WPP to do this for you. They (at least I hope they would) have to monitor thier networks and make sure that everything is up a little more than a DNS ONLY provider. ISP/WPP's are usually a little more strict on server conditions, and speeds than someone looking to make a fast $5 or something.

I would recommend backupdns.com, they have an attractiva price scheme and the service is good (+ fast response times).

I would recommend www.ultradns.com I have an account with them for 4 months and everything has been great. One thing to note is that they don't use bind but a proprietary software (which I still don't know what it is). Other than that, zone setup is still the same as bind, and you'll hardly notice any difference when editing the zone files (through a control panel).

One thing that you can't do with ultradns is register your own nameservers eg. ns1.mydomain.com and ns2.mydomain.com Instead, you'd have to use their nameservers, udns1.ultradns.net and udns2.ultradns.net and point your domains to them.

They offer two services, basic ($24 per year) and managed (around $54+ per month). I'm using managed services and it comes with recursive, primary dns, secondary dns and more.

I can't say anything bad about them for now. Support has been a little slow to respond but tolerable (2-3 hours to reply). Other than that they are good and I'd recommend them. The other reason I choose them was because I didn't want to get two dedicated servers to run dns as that would be really expensive plus their dns propogates like lightning!

I use Zoneedit.com for my sites, instant updates, and almost 100% uptime (I've only measured 6 minutes of downtime in the past 6 or 7 months).

- Matt

I second m00ds recommendation of UltraDNS. I have been with them for 6 months and everything has worked great. The few support tickets that I have submitted have been answered in less than 2 hours, and they have even called me, following up on tickets I have submitted with them, to ensure they answered them correctly. I have registered my own name servers and point them to the UltraDNS name server IP addresses, and that has worked out fine for my needs.

Originally posted by m00ds
One thing that you can't do with ultradns is register your own nameservers eg. ns1.mydomain.com and ns2.mydomain.com Instead, you'd have to use their nameservers, udns1.ultradns.net and udns2.ultradns.net and point your domains to them.


Do you know of any good/excellent companies that offer this?

-s.h.a.z.y.

Originally posted by s.h.a.z.y.


Do you know of any good/excellent companies that offer this?

-s.h.a.z.y.

None that I'm aware of right now. Try doing a search on google?

There's one thing I failed to mention earlier. If you're still interested in ultradns, there's another solution I'm subscribed to that could be useful to you. You could use secondary dns services from ultradns. You can set it as:

Primary: ns.yourdomain.com
Secondary: ultradns1
Tertiary: ultradns2

The usual configuration for bind applies here. You set up your own zone files on your own dns servers and allow transfers from ultradns servers. :) There's a catch though, you'd have to be subscribed to managed services.

If switching registrars is an option, http://pairnic.com provides dns management with registration (even round-robin dns).