Service Review: DNS Made Easy
When clients ask me to recommend a DNS provider, I used to suggest UltraDNS. UltraDNS uses Anycast routing which gives DDoS protection as well as excellent performance, since clients get service from servers that are closer to them. UltraDNS has massive redundancy, which also makes it a great choice from a security perspective. I started using DNS Made Easy about 2 months ago and I was blown away. They use the same Anycast technology UltraDNS does, they have redundant servers (they added 100 servers to their network last year) in multiple countries, their interface is clear, simple and easy to use, and most importantly they are a fraction of the cost of UltraDNS. Their most expensive package has more queries than you’ll ever need and is still less than $150/month. Smaller sites would be able to use their less expensive package which is a little over a dollar a month ($14.95/year.)
The DNS Made Easy interface is really simple to use, unlike a lot of the DNS managers from web-hosting companies such as GoDaddy or 1&1. Adding domain-level redirects is extremely simple and straightforward, as are the usual suspects like adding A records, CNAMEs and setting TTLs. One feature I really like from DNS Made Easy is the ability to do a “soft” redirect. If you change your domain, you need to redirect your old URLs to the new one. This is especially important if you have a lot of indexed pages. DNS Made Easy has a “soft” redirect feature, which keeps the path information for the new URL. This means your URLs that are currently indexed (http://olddomain.com/some/indexed/url.html) gets redirected to the “right” place on the new domain (http://newdomain.com/some/indexed/url.html). The same thing can be done using an Apache rewrite rule if you don’t want to use DNS Made Easy. For example, a 301 “soft” redirect to newdomain.com:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
One thing that turns a lot of people off about UltraDNS is the cost. DNS Made Easy is based on the same AnyCast technology but is much, much cheaper. For a little over a dollar a month you get 3 domains with 1 million DNS queries per month. With UltraDNS being $100 per 1,000 queries, the prices don’t even compare. Also, UltraDNS charges by resource record (i.e. the more A, MX, CNAME records you have, the more you pay) but DNS Made Easy does not.
As a final note, even if you’re not convinced to use DNS Made Easy for your primary DNS needs, it is an inexpensive way to have secondary DNS in case your primaries go offline. DNS Made Easy can act as a slave for your own master running BIND. This is a great combination for those of us who like to do it ourselves but don’t have the resources (or money!) to build our own redundant, Anycast network.
Note that this review was not paid for, or endorsed by DNS Made Easy. Nor am I an affiliate.
How are things with DME so far? You would have been with them for about 9 months now. We are shopping around for a DNS provider with failover function.
DME is the best priced option by far. Next best is Dynect at around $200pm. I have been monitoring both DME and Dynect using Pingdom and there is a difference in performance (you would expect this with the price differential of around x20).
Dynect gives a consistent response time between 7 and 50ms from most locations. DME is less consistent and get between 15 and 500ms.
I’ve been using DME for my work’s domains for about a year and a half now. We’ve got the 25 domain plan, and its great. Simple interface that lets you get things done quickly, and zero issues the whole time. Their vanity DNS service is nice too, having branded DNS servers was what drew me to their service at the time we were looking for an outsourced provider.
The only features I’d like to see are the ability to copy records between domains and possibly a bulk add feature (using a CSV or BIND config file). They have a feature where you can add a record to multiple domains, but that doesn’t help if the records are already present in your other domains when adding a new one.
Either way, those are just minor improvements from a “power user” perspective. Beyond that, my experience with DME has been nothing but positive.
I recently tried to use their backup mail service-thought I’d save myself a few bucks. Turns out their service had a forwarding restriction that was not present on other backup mail services I had used.
But the worst was that when I tried to talk to customer service, I found that first they didn’t read and/or understand my configuration, only worked 9-5 in some time zone, and were unwilling to raise the issue to someone who understood, and then just ignored my requests for a refund.
I regret ever trying them.
When configuring back up mail service with DNS Made Easy, you are required to enter only the domain name you wish to back up email for (example.com). You are then provided with 3 additional MX records that must be added to your DNS records for the configured domain name, in addition to your primary mail server (the first destination for email). Mr. Mayer (Sandstones) configured his Back up mail service using the fully qualified domain name of his mail server, rather than the name of the domain itself which is what caused his problem. This issue was immediately told to Mr. Mayer but he was not willing to make the change in his configuration or accept that we require a domain name and not a mail server name. All backup mail services offered in the world require a domain name (not a backup email server).
Rather than entering mayermail.net into the domain name field, he insisted on using the FQDN of his mail server which was “local.mayermail.net”. This is why his Back up MX service did not work correctly. On top of the incorrect domain name provided by Mr. Mayer he also had incorrect MX records configured incorrectly. As you can see below he even tried to put an IP address in his MX record (which does not comply with and DNS RFCs and he would loose email right there):
mayermail.net mail is handled by 4 67.212.232.108.
mayermail.net mail is handled by 5 etratek.com.
Even though DNS Made Easy has a no refund policy management reviewed Mr. Mayer’s request and decided to approve his refund request. Because his credit card information was not stored on file (he requested this) he was told to submit a fax request which was never received. So the configuration problem and the refund request were both answered to Mr. Mayer within hours but he chose (at this point) to do nothing about them.
Since this time Mr. Mayer has fixed his MX records to comply with basic RFCs so at least we are happy to see that Mr. Mayer is now receiving email again. DNS Made Easy was happy to assist this user in correcting his MX record problems even though he did not use our DNS services from DNS Made Easy.
DNS Made Easy is always happy to discuss this support issue or any support issue that users are willing to address in public forum with anyone that posts them.