At 10:55 AM 4/9/01, you wrote:
> 4. The trouble I am having is that clients that have registered > with Network > Solutions and a few other ones do not have that option and have no way of > directing to my box. > 5. I do not have the Cobalt DNS enabled and was hopeing not to have to do > this. I figure that this will be what I have to do but am very unsure what > is required. I have been told that maintaining the DNS is a very time > consuming and troublesome job, but If this is what needs to be done then I > will do it but am unsure what it takes to make it happen. > > Any and all replies will be welcome!
A year ago, I knew *nothing* about DNS. I've since studied it a bit, read nearly all of "DNS and Bind", and decided that it's not something I wanted to have to manage.
So I started looking at outsourcing DNS. I highly recommend this, and here's a brief overview of what I've found.
granitecanyon.com: Oldest public DNS service. Completely free. Nearly worthless, because it goes down ALL THE TIME and their support is nonexistent. It was down for nearly 3 weeks a couple months ago. However, when it works, it's fine :) (NOT recommended)
centralinfo.net (now worldwidedns.net). Offered a completely free service for a year, but people abused it so they converted to a pay service. Very easy to use, intuitive interface that handles all but the most advanced DNS records. Pretty inexpensive (between $2.50 and $5 per zone (domain) per year, depending on the volume of zones you buy. Nice folks you can get on the phone for help or problems. Only catch is, centralinfo has no redundancy; while they have several T3s, they're all with UUNET, and I've had two separate cases where UUNET had backbone problems and I had no DNS for any of my customers for anywhere from 2 to 6 hours. Granted, this is rare, but it does make me uncomfortable.
zoneedit.com: A relatively new player, but seems to host a lot zones, and has rates similar to Centralinfo. An easy-to-use interface for novices, but for someone who knows what they want to do, it's a really clumsy, multi-page interface to set up a single zone. However, they have amazing redundancy. They have 9 separate DNS servers in something like 4 different NOCs, geographically spread across the country, so downtime would be very unlikely. You get 2 servers in 2 different NOCs for the basic fee, and you can buy more (up to 9 if you want) for critical sites. They also allow you to host up to 5 domains for free... which is a great way to try it out.
Both zoneedit and centralinfo have one other *wonderful* thing: zone information is updated in their DNS instantly after you make an entry; most of the DNS services run by your upstream ISP or colo NOC only reboot once or twice a day, usually coinciding with the root zone file updates. So with zoneedit and centralinfo, the DNS starts responding as soon as you make the entry... so if, for example, you need to change the IP address, the new IP information will start to propagate nearly instantly (depending on the time-to-live setting) rather than waiting 12 to 24 hours for a reboot.
I've found that using an outsource DNS provider is, for me at least, *MUCH* less expensive in the long run than messing with Bind, while still giving me the control of the record, not locking me in to a particular ISP, and providing excellent redundancy.
Hope this helps.... feel free to email with any questions. Chip