DNS Made Easy Review
Widgets & RSS FeedsI 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 them as well.
Once I decided I wanted to stop having to maintain my own DNS server, I began evaluating a number of commercial DNS services. I found DNS Made Easy management interface flexible, feature rich, and the pricing was attractive for multiple domains. 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. The service supports A, CNAME, MX, NS, PTR, SRV, and TXT records in addition to HTTP redirection. You can specify vanity nameservers (ie. ns1.yourdomain.com), configure the TTLs and SOA records. Many hosting providers and DNS service providers only allow users to create and manage limited record types. Often DNS services do not allow users to shorten the TTL values, which can make server migrations more difficult and time consuming. DNS Made Easy offers 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. However, most users who require a dedicated DNS hosting service will likely be happy with this as a tradeoff. The documentation is substantial and there are a series of screencasts that illustrate the various configuration tasks. Zones reload every 30 minutes. 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.
Update for May 2009: I have been a DNS Made Easy customer for about a year and have been happy with them so I renewed my subscription. I upgraded to the business membership class that includes 25 domains and DNS failover and system monitoring for three machines. I’m considering adding their backup MX/backup mail service to the mix.
