Why Custom DNS

A not uncommon question we get asked is "Why should I use Custom DNS"? Oddly enough we get this question from several different types of customers.

I'll try to address each of these specific groups in this document. If you don't fall into one of these groups, you may well be close enough to one or the other that this will make sense to you as well. If not, feel free to contact us and ask why you too should be using Custom DNS ;-)

Registrar-provided DNS

When you get right down to it, DNS is a fairly inexpensive service to provide. The packets are small and the servers themselves are fairly lightweight. This, bundled with the fact that you have to have DNS if you have a domain, makes it reasonable for registrars to provide the DNS as part of the registration service.

The down side of this is that the DNS provided by registrars tends to be very limited in scope. Often they let you only create a couple of host names, one or two MX records and maybe a wildcard CNAME. And, in many cases, the name servers they provide are on a single network (putting your DNS service at risk).

Through our Custom DNS service, we provide a web-based DNS management interface that allows the customer to create an unlimited number of resource records, and we serve those zones off of a vastly distributed network of servers, far exceeding anything provided by most registrar-provided DNS services.

Free or very low cost DNS

The growth of the Internet has spawned dozens if not hundreds of companies providing free or low cost DNS services. Often times these companies are providing DNS services off of a server which has some other primary duty but yet has spare processor cycles. Providing primary or secondary DNS is a way for them to recoup some of the costs associated with having that server available. Before you put your domain in the hands of one of these companies, make sure they are prepared to provide you with the support you will need if/when something goes wrong.

We provide best of class e-mail and phone based technical support for free with our Custom DNS service, and if you need 24/7 access to our support staff, this is available at a reasonable rate (see our Premier Support service).

Hosting your own DNS

There's an old adage, "if you want something done right, do it yourself". There are lots of cases where this holds true, but DNS is not one of them. Good, reliable DNS requires a distributed, fault tolerant network.

Ok, you've got that T1 line into your office and you're hosting your web server right there. Why not provide your own DNS? Well, what happens when that guy working on the road outside your office cuts your T1 line with his back-hoe (don't laugh, it happens). Ok, you switch over to your backup DSL line and you can get back out to the Internet. But your DNS servers are known by the static IP address routed through your T1 line, and it will take 4 days to get that changed and propagated.

Get your DNS off your local network and onto a remote, fault tolerant network. That way you can easily route around network/power outages, server failures, whatever.