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Clay Nichols
Asked: 2013-05-05 09:25:41 +0800 CST

How can I evaluate the quality of the DNS Domain Name Servers of a provider?

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I have domains purchased through Godaddy and the site hosted through Web.com.

I'm trying to decide whether which company's Name Servers to use. It's simpler to use Godaddy's BUT they provide only two, whereas WEb.com provides three. (Obviously it's more complicated than that: is there a simple point of failure, response time, etc.)

So I'm wondering specifically how to evaluate the quality of the domain name servers for each (response time, uptime, etc.)

Update: I found these two tools that might help

  • http://www.dnssy.com/ - measure all sorts of things on the specific domain name and it's DNS servers.
  • DNS tester - tests just the response time of the DNS servers.
domain-name-system

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    i'd say - if you are concerned about the resiliency / quality / [low] latency - go for dedicated dns provider using uni-cast like dyn.com.

    otherwise - it does not really matter - both web.com and godaddy.com are pretty big players.

    things you might want to consider:

    • response time from locations where you are most likely to have clients
    • their uptime
    • [lack] of support for ipv6, dnssec
    • information how did they handled past outages [pretty difficult to measure]
    • competence of the client-facing staff [same]

    in all cases - it's pretty difficult to get information about the past performance

    tools that can be helpful in checking general dns health:

    site like http://www.just-ping.com/index.php?vh=kernel.org can be used to check latency to your dns serevers from different points of the globe [or empirically verify if you're using unicast/anycast dns server]

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