On Message with Ben Gross

I have been hosting my own DNS for at least a decade. I recently switched to DNS Made Easy and have been happy with the service. I have also used EveryDNS as a no-frills secondary DNS service for years and recommend it.

I began evaluating commercial DNS services and found DNS Made Easy. The management interface looked flexible and the pricing is attractive. The service supports both dynamic DNS and anycast routing for domains. The pricing is structured into the following levels—$15 a year for 3 domains, 120 records, and a million queries a month. $30 a year for 10 domains, 400 records, and 5 million queries a month. $60 a year for 25 domains, 1000 records, and 10 million queries a month. $1500 for 50 domains, 2000 records, 50 million queries a month in addition to migration support, dedicated IP addresses, and priority customer support. Additional resources may be purchased as add-ons.

DNS Made Easy has a number of features that greatly simplify management. The service supports templates for groups of DNS records, which makes it possibly to quickly modify records for a block or all of your domains at once. DNS Made Easy supports A, CNAME, MX, NS, PTR, SRV, and TXT records in addition to HTTP redirection. The service allows you to specify vanity nameservers (ie. ns1.yourdomain.com) and supports end user configuration of TTLs and SOA records. I found numerous web hosting provider’s DNS and independent DNS service providers only allow users to managed limited record types. For example, many do not let users shorten TTLs, which can make server migrations more difficult and time consuming. DNS Made Easy also offers options for Secondary DNS, backup MX and DNS failover where you can specify an alternate set of DNS records if your server is unreachable.

The DNS Made Easy web-based management interface is reasonable, but could be improved with a clearer layout. The user interface favors flexibility over usability although most users who require a dedicated DNS hosting service will likely be happy with this as a tradeoff. The documentation is reasonably comprehensive and series of screencasts illustrating the various configuration tasks. Zones reload every 30 minutes and I found my changes and new additions went into affect quickly. The only problem I encountered was that I could not get the settings to allow zone transfers to stick. I still need to investigate that issue. Overall, after a month of use, I’m happy with the service for DNS Made Easy and I would recommend it.