I'm wondering how Dyn is taking this. These guys have been working on DNS for years, and were probably one of the first "managed DNS" or "enterprise DNS" services. Over time though they've failed to really innovate, or even keep up with standard (you can't use any of their value add services like the global traffic manager if you also want to use DNSSEC, for instance). Despite this their prices have remained ridiculously high. Now that other players are moving into the market at literally multiple orders of magnitude cheaper it's tough to see why any of their customers would stay.
As a personal note, I would recommend the Edgecast DNS service over anything else. They have amazing customer support (something Google really lacks), and they've been in the CDN game for long enough to know that they are going to be around for awhile. They're also rather crazy about getting the best performance possible.
Route53 is not a bad option. If you're using EdgeCast CDN as well you'll probably get a discount on DNS (and I will point out that the EdgeCast CDN is faster, and more importantly, a hell of a lot cheaper than Cloudfront is).
@nieksand, feel free to get in touch with us at speedyrails.com (EdgeCast's resellers), I'm sure we can offer you a much better price than CloudFront's
I use dyn as well as run several dns servers in different places [1]
My reason for not using this is that it's being offered by google and the obvious fear that they will decide one day to stop offering this, supporting it, or improving it. As I am experiencing now with google voice for example,
[1] Since the mid 90's actually learning from this book:
I'm still with Dyn because their performance is ahead of Route53 and their health-check and failover functionalities are at this moment better than Edgecast.
However, we're using Edgecast for some things because the prices are much lower and they are actually capable of doing the same kind of health-check, failover and routing tricks at Dyn does. Their interface is just not fully ready yet so you have to email support to get changes and custom rules.
EDIT: Very quick non-representative test from 8 locations around the world shows Dyn responds faster than Google DNS in all of them. Note that these were datacenter connections so it could be very different for lower-bandwidth end-users.
Can anyone recommend a cheap DNS service that does geographic-based load distribution? I know that Route53 offers something like this, but AFAIK it's only designed for products hosted on Amazon's platforms.
I've heard that geographic-based DNS has something of a bad reputation, but I think it would be a very good fit for a side project I'm working on.
Check out http://nsone.net - newer service with a unique approach to geo/load balancing/failover using user defined rulesets (filter chains and data feeds).
You can do latency based load balancing to non-AWS endpoints with Route 53 -- the limitation is that you have to associate those endpoints with an AWS region. If your endpoints are not anywhere near an AWS region, you're stuck. Otherwise fine!
As a personal note, I would recommend the Edgecast DNS service over anything else. They have amazing customer support (something Google really lacks), and they've been in the CDN game for long enough to know that they are going to be around for awhile. They're also rather crazy about getting the best performance possible.