DNS Hosting Services

Can you recommend a good DNS hosting service?

I'm looking for a happy median between the free (and not reliable) providers and the staggeringly expensive ones.

We use DNSMadeEasy and it is very smooth. Reasonably priced and they have not had any downtime in 2 years. We also use they for our SMTP mail as well which makes things easy.

For some reason, I'm a bit of a DNS geek, and have followed this area for years.

DNS hosting is basically a solved problem, i.e. it is not that hard to build a good DNS infrastructure and get perfectly good speed and reliability. There are quite many good providers out there.

In addition to the good answers already given, I'd like to mention Gandi. Their DNS servers are not Anycast'ed (i.e. no multisite with the same IP addresses BGP routed for failover and speed), but they have been perfectly reliable and responsive for me for years. They have 4 things that I like:

1. You can register domains in most top level domains (TLD) with them. They can be a one-stop shop for all your domain needs (as long as you don't need the exotic TLDs).
2. They are cheap. Hosting DNS doesn't cost anything, it comes free with registration.
3. Their web interface is fairly simple to use. And DNS experts can skip the web interface, and edit the BIND zone file directly.
4. They have spam filtering. For the domain ownership information they publish an alias for your real email, and this alias is valid but spam filtered. Quite nice, since whois records are a major spam-source.

In addition to Gandi, I would suggest DNSMadeEasy & DynDNS & EasyDNS as other good recommendable providers (no particular order, their services and prices differ a bit, take a look around).

If reliability is a major decision point, maybe I'd say DNSMadeEasy looks a bit better than Gandi, and DynDNS Dynect seems best of them all. But note, that's just based on their implementation and past performance, I cannot make any promises for future performance.

I've used several DNS hosts, including ones mentioned on this list. The one I like best is Nettica (http://nettica.com ). Great interface and great pricing.

We've used ZoneEdit at Smart Bear for years. No down-time and not expensive.

If you do your own DNS someday they can also act as DNS backup.

DynDns has a good paid offering with a SLA: http://www.dyndns.com/services/pricing/#dns. At $300/year it does not seem very expensive, and does offer a SLA, so it's better than self-hosted.

My knowledge about this is limited though, there might be other hosts out there who can beat this deal.

You could ask in http://ServerFault.com, they for sure can give you more options. Outsourced DNS services is not something us normal folk use very often, so you will probably have better luck in ServerFault.

I have used DNSmadeEasy for hosting DNS for some productions systems we ran. It has that nice failover feature and customizability. Price is right too.

I just found out about DNSimple, checked them out and their service looked awesome. The UI is fantastic, just 2 screens, so makes registration ridiculously easy to setup and manage. Transferring my domains from GoDaddy to there as we speak.

https://entrydns.net/ is a free DNS service I built in my spare time together with a sysadmin friend.

We hope to support it via donations and/or unobtrusive affiliate sales, and add more features in the future. Give it a try.