As part of moving this website to a new server in order to try and speed things up a tad, I had to change some DNS records on several of the domains I own.
I’ve mostly been using the free control panel provided by my domain registrar to mange the basic DNS records associated with each domain but in the past I’ve used other free services so that I don’t loose my records should I move the domain to another registrar.
A few of the domains that you can use to access this site had their DNS hosted with a company called ZoneEdit. A while ago I’d done some searching and come across them as a free DNS provider and their service looked pretty good. You could sign up for a free account which would allow you to host 3 domains on their servers free of charge. If you required more than 3 zones, you could add additional ones at a cost. When I initially moved my DNS over to them, their set up looked pretty good and their web interface was simple and quick.
I hadn’t logged in to my ZoneEdit account in quite a while as I haven’t had the need to make any changes to the DNS records for those zones. However, when I did log in I was quite disappointed to find their interface had suddenly become slow and cumbersome. The page load times for zone information were excruciatingly slow and changes seemed to take forever to propagate out to the internet.
While researching IPv6 a while ago I came across another company called Hurricane Electric. Anyone who has anything to do with the ISP industry will have probably heard of HE as they are absolutely huge in that sector. They offer free IPv6 certifications that require you to garner a thorough understanding and also perform several practical IPv6 implementation tasks.
While going through these tasks I used several of their free services, one of which is hosted DNS. Like ZoneEdit, their service is free, but HE allow you to host 50 zones without charges. Their web based management interface is straightforward and very quick. Changes seemed to be published almost immediately and the online help available for those not well versed in DNS is quite comprehensive.
I have now moved all of the domains I did host with ZoneEdit over to HE and will be migrating more away from the registrars that currently provide DNS services. I also use their free IPv6 tunnel broker service, but that’s a story for another post. If you’re in the marked for some hosted DNS services, I can’t recommend HE highly enough, check them out!