When clients ask me to recommend a DNS provider, I used to suggest UltraDNS. UltraDNS uses Anycast routing which gives DDoS protection as well as excellent performance, since clients get service from servers that are closer to them. UltraDNS has massive redundancy, which also makes it a great choice from a security perspective. I started using DNS Made Easy about 2 months ago and I was blown away. They use the same Anycast technology UltraDNS does, they have redundant servers (they added 100 servers to their network last year) in multiple countries, their interface is clear, simple and easy to use, and most importantly they are a fraction of the cost of UltraDNS. Their most expensive package has more queries than you’ll ever need and is still less than $150/month. Smaller sites would be able to use their less expensive package which is a little over a dollar a month ($14.95/year.)
The DNS Made Easy interface is really simple to use, unlike a lot of the DNS managers from web-hosting companies such as GoDaddy or 1&1. Adding domain-level redirects is extremely simple and straightforward, as are the usual suspects like adding A records, CNAMEs and setting TTLs. One feature I really like from DNS Made Easy is the ability to do a “soft” redirect. If you change your domain, you need to redirect your old URLs to the new one. This is especially important if you have a lot of indexed pages. DNS Made Easy has a “soft” redirect feature, which keeps the path information for the new URL. This means your URLs that are currently indexed (http://olddomain.com/some/indexed/url.html) gets redirected to the “right” place on the new domain (http://newdomain.com/some/indexed/url.html). The same thing can be done using an Apache rewrite rule if you don’t want to use DNS Made Easy. For example, a 301 “soft” redirect to newdomain.com:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
One thing that turns a lot of people off about UltraDNS is the cost. DNS Made Easy is based on the same AnyCast technology but is much,
much cheaper. For a little over a dollar a month you get 3 domains with 1 million DNS queries per month. With UltraDNS being $100 per 1,000 queries,
the prices don’t even compare. Also, UltraDNS charges by resource record (i.e. the more A, MX, CNAME records you have, the more you pay)
but DNS Made Easy does not.
As a final note, even if you’re not convinced to use DNS Made Easy for your primary DNS needs, it is an inexpensive way to
have secondary DNS in case your primaries go offline. DNS Made Easy can act as a slave for your own master running BIND. This is a great combination
for those of us who like to do it ourselves but don’t have the resources (or money!) to build our own redundant, Anycast network.
Note that this review was not paid for, or endorsed by DNS Made Easy. Nor am I an affiliate.