If you are interested in DNS performance comparison, I created a tool for comparing DNS query times of 16 different hosted DNS providers including Route 53, Dyn, DNS Made Easy, UltraDNS, Rackspace, SoftLayer, Easy DNS, Zerigo and a few others here: http://cloudharmony.com/dnstest
It is a browser/javascript based test that uses a wildcard DNS record and alternating between cached and non cached lookups to determine an approximate query time for each provider.
I'm a little confused here. Wouldn't client DNS resolution performance really depend on your local DNS cache (e.g. the DNS server at your ISP)? Nobody going to your site will hit Route 53 or MediaTemple's DNS servers directly. These only serve as the source of truth for the thousands of DNS caches out there that clients actually hit.
Typically this is true as the only performance hit will be due to the initial lookup, and then your resolver will cache the record. However, if your DNS record uses a low TTL (required for things like DNS-based monitoring/failover) like 30 secs or 1 minute, DNS lookups will have a larger impact on site performance because user resolvers will have to frequently re-query the authoritative DNS.
Providers that utilize an Anycast DNS infrastructure (Route 53, Dyn, DNS Made Easy, Cotendo, Easy DNS) will generally be faster for lookups than those that do not due to lower network latency. This is especially true for international users where latency might be 500ms higher than in the US.
Route53 is an excellent service, and the latest price reduction makes it even more attractive - but using the API directly as an end user is a little cumbersome, especially for cloud servers.
A while ago I thought "wouldn't it be great if when launching a cloud server some magic would happen and the server would get assigned a human/friendly name of my choice? I'm tired of remembering IP addresses, and logging into my DNS management console to setup records."
Following that thought we added Domain management and a free dynamic DNS service to the TurnKey Linux Hub.
That is a welcome change. Previously, Route 53 was useless for services that involve hosting user domains (web hosting, for example) because of $1/month charge per zone. 1000 low traffic sites would cost $1000 per month just for domain zones. With the new pricing the cost would be $110. That is close or even lower than what competitors are charging.
For those on HN who use Route 53: Would you recommend switching from another provider?
I use route53 for all of my domains (I don't have anywhere near 1000). The $1/mo was worth it to me simply to ease the pain of updating DNS information; I set the name servers once (to point to AWS), and then only have to look to one place (through shell!) to manage DNS. I switch VPS hosts often enough that having shell based tool like route53 to switch DNS records has come in very handy. I also have a habit of switching domain registrars regularly. Having DNS managed by a 3rd party like route53 makes a change like this simple (just updating name servers once the transfer's done). I don't have the time to learn how to manage my own DNS server, so I'm happy to pay $1/mo to make my life a bit easier, and even happier to pay $0.50.
We've (Epio) been using Route53 for 6 months or so now, and have had zero problems with it. The main problem is, as others have said, that the only way to interact with it is via the (somewhat cumbersome) API.
We got round this by writing our own Python command-line tool using Boto, which sadly I have yet to release...
All I have to type is "cli53 import example.com --file example.bind --replace --wait" and it'll replace all of the records for example.com with what's in the BIND file, and the --wait makes it poll Amazon until the "pending changes" go through.
It is a dead-simple protocol, and the level of caching at various levels between your server and the user would seem to make super-fast DNS serving irrelevant to the browser experience.
As it is, queries on a 2004 level server box running lots of other services are under 2ms on a local network, so really network latency is the issue...
having 2 simple 1U boxes colocated in NYC and LA, would cost under $200 per month and give you full control and the ability to host thousands if not tens of thousands of domains.
What you really would do, given your list above, would be
- Buy hardware from vendor, ship direct to colo.
- When racked, they hook up a KVM/IP device that has virtual media support to the system.
- You install your OS from your desktop machine.
- Turn off all services except DNS and public key SSH with hosts.deny and hosts.allow setup appropriately
- Use automated scripts to move zones from current setup to djbdns format .
- Tweak Makefile for djbdns (included in the distribution) to use ssh to move both the datafile and a text-version backup of the file, to each system. You can keep your original files on a machine local to you and push the changes via SSH that way.
- you should have a machine or two outside your facility to run e.g. smokeping or other measurement/monitoring tools anyways; so run smokeping etc. on the same machine and if you are paranoid, run the webserver on 127.0.0.1 and use SSH tunneling to view the pages.
Usually for $100/month per server, you can get outage monitoring and 30 minutes of remote hands per month, included.
True, but without Anycast you wont' be able to control which server users query, and your latency for EU or APAC users will probably be in the range of 200-800ms. Route 53 uses Anycast network infrastructure with many geographically dispersed POPs so users will hit the closest POP dramatically reducing latency. For $200/mo you could host a hundred domains and billions of queries with much better performance using Route 53.
It's still almost 3x as much as dnsmadeeasy.com. I pay $60/year to manage up to 25 domains with 10mil queries. Looks like Route 53 would make sense if you need an order of magnitude more queries, though.
Has amazon developed an interface for administering Route 53 domains? Relying on 3rd party interfaces has always been the real deal breaker with Route 53 for me.
It is a browser/javascript based test that uses a wildcard DNS record and alternating between cached and non cached lookups to determine an approximate query time for each provider.