Issue 31: Why is Custom DNS Better?

October 14, 2008

For Dyn-Inc., the domain name system is our love and lifeblood. When we launched our Custom DNS service in 2001, we knew we were one of the best providers around, because plenty of the existing providers knew they could get away with offering stock-standard, run-of-the-mill services. Today, our company has grown from a donations-based free service for the Perl community to a customer base of over two million, from all over the globe and from all walks of life; we're still one of the best DNS providers around, but there are more options today than when we started, and making the right choice for your home office or small business is important. In this post, I'd like to talk about why our Custom DNS service is still an industry standard.

One of the greatest advantages Custom DNS offers over traditional DNS is the ability to update host records programmatically. Using Auxlang, our open-source standard for dynamic DNS, host records can be assigned a new IP with a simple HTTP GET request. This allows you to keep hosts automatically updated with dynamic addresses, giving you the flexibility to easily reach locations where static IPs are prohibitively expensive or simply unavailable. You can even script your own update client application in a matter of minutes, allowing you to tailor-fit a client to any environment.

Thanks to the open nature of Auxlang, you'll also find update client applications embedded in a wide variety of devices, such as Linksys and D-Link routers, giving you even more freedom and flexibility to set up a client anywhere to allow easy access, from a remote camera at your cabin in the woods to a backup server in another office building. You can measure the success of the Auxlang protocol by the people that use it: in addition to our Custom DNS service and our new enterprise-level Dynect platform, popular service providers such as Open DNS, No-IP and Netgear have adopted Auxlang to provide better functionality to their own userbases.

Another benefit of Custom DNS is the wide variety of record types you can create under our service. While many providers allow a handful of records and only two or three record types, our Custom DNS service provides the standard A, CNAME, MX and TXT records, and additionally offers the following records:

Other providers may also charge on a per-record basis, such as an extra monthly fee per additional host record after the first; Custom DNS allows you to create up to 75 records of any type in a zone for the same single yearly fee. Furthermore, Custom DNS doesn't restrict the way you can use these records, and even provides BIND-like interface options and the ability to set customized TTL (time-to-live) values to control caching.

Lastly, we don't restrict which registrars you can use with Custom DNS; if you wish to use another company for your registration, and prefer to delegate the domain's DNS duties to our nameservers, you'll find the Custom DNS service works flawlessly with your domain no matter where it's registered. For customers that like to keep their DNS and registration in one place (to keep track of expirations), it's easy and painless to transfer an existing registration into our systems.

Of course, even the best services are nothing without dedicated, knowledgeable support staff and top-notch engineers, and DynDNS is proud of its industry-leading support and operations teams. We're ready to help you with anything you need, whether you're a DNS novice or an expert. We're always happy to answer any questions about our services; send us an email and we'll be happy to assist you in making the right choices.

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