What DNS Provider do you suggest?

Discussions
#1

There was a thread about Hosting Provider’s, I’m curious to get suggestions for DNS providers.

When I got started, a friend set me up with Office365 for email, which I haven’t like too much. But the real pain is that DNS is required to be managed by them, and they don’t support wildcard DNS or have an API. This is a killer for me when I create new customer accounts as I need to add an entry manually (customer.sharpplm.com, etc.).

I’ve thought of using Route53. My hosting is on Azure (which I really like), but they don’t have anything like Route53 (that I know of). I’d be curious to know what other people use.

#2

I’ve heard good things about https://pointhq.com/ and http://www.zoneedit.com/ - haven’t used them myself though, my registrars’ nameservers are usually sufficient.

#3

Dnsimple: https://dnsimple.com/r/d2b2734a34b81d referral link

Simply the bees knees.

#4

@andycroll, It seems like I’ve come across their site before. Are they bootstrappers as well?

#5

I think they may well be.

https://dnsimple.com/our-story

#6

DNSimple is the best +100

#7

dnsmadeeasy.com. Stable and fast

#8

I use Heroku, and when I needed SSL, they required that I set up a DNSimple account. And when I did, I was pretty impressed with their product. They have a great UI.

And they must have a good bizdev person/team if they were able to get this arrangement with Heroku!

#9

They’ve been Heroku’s ‘DNS people’ of choice for a long time… simply because they enabled a couple of things on the DNS record side that were useful in the less sophisticated days of Heroku… which no other DNS provider did very well (or even at all). Plus great UI.

Very smart.

#10

I’ve been using DNS Made Easy for years. They are much cheaper than DNSimple with plans starting at $29.95 per year vs DNSimple’s $96 / year ($8 / month). They are rock solid and have been around a long time. Their interface is not as nice as DNSimple but honestly it doesn’t matter to me since I typically setup DNS and never log in again.

I’ve also used DNSimple. It does have a nice interface but not nice enough to justify me paying more than double more.

Note: DNS Made Easy also works with Heroku with ANAME records for the root CNAME and is also recommended by Heroku.

#11

Been a dnsmadeeasy.com customer for a long time now. Never had any issues (minus their control panel design but I don’t have to look at that very often :smile: )

#12

dnsmadeeasy.com. stable, cheap

#13

yes, they are bootstrappers. Anthony does the Strong Businesses podcast - http://strongbusinessespodcast.com/

#14

I host on Rackspace and just used their bundled DNS management for forever. My domains were previously at GoDaddy, but recently I decided to migrate off of them.

The best combination registrar/DNS provider that I saw was DNSimple, as mentioned by several other people. I picked them partly because they’re good folks, partly because I have a weak aesthetic preference for doing business with small businesses where possible, and partially because I think they’re more robust against a “Some scammer pretends to be Patrick” attack than GoDaddy (precisely because there are only 3 of them).

General note: I respect enormously the need to conserve money early on, but no software business ever succeeded or failed as a result of < $100 per year in savings on a business expense.

#15

A big recommendation for DNSimple as well. We recently put together a list of all the services we are using: http://blog.kickofflabs.com/saas-behind-our-saas/

#16

I agree < $100 per year should not be the motivating factor for making a business decision :slight_smile:

fwiw - my recommendation for DNS Made Easy is not just because it is cheaper. It is a great service and as an added bonus it is cheaper.

I think either DNS Made Easy or DNSimple are great options though.

#17

I just launched https://zoned.io/ it’s still early days, but it is supporting xp-dev.com’s DNS traffic. Please do give it a try, and feedback is always welcome!

#18

I’ve been using Hurricane Electric (https://dns.he.net) for a couple of projects. They are free and reliable.

#19

For new products I’ve been starting with CloudFlare (free) and then upgrading to Route53 or DynDNS (standard DNS) as needed.

I’ve wanted to try out CloudFlare’s professional packages for a while though - a little more pricy though.