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Rage4 Review
BunnySpeed
Member, Host Rep
I have been using Rage4 DNS for various projects for the last 3-4 years and I guess I decided to write a bit about them 
Reliability (5/5):
In the past 3 years I don't recall any downtime caused by their DNS, at least one that I'm aware of. Even if there were any problems that I didn't hear of, they must have been minimal.
Features (5/5):
Maybe I'm biased here, but they have just everything that we needed + some extra stuff that looks nice but I never looked into.
GeoDNS Routing (5/5):
There were some problems in the past cause by Google's DNS that broke their GeoDNS routing, but it has since improved. Except for China, the global routing is almost always spot on. Also their routing configuration is incredibly powerful.
Price (2/5):
I am not sure where they pull their query counts, but these are incredibly high. They changed how the queries are counted somewhere down the road, but I'm still not sure if these numbers are correct. On top of that, their current tier is 2€/mil queries which is absurd to say the least. So 50mil queries is 100€/month. After that the price is 1€/mil which is still pretty damn high, especially considering that Amazon Route 53 charges ~0.615€/mil from the start and then ~0.3€/mil. And this is ONLY if you use GeoDNS, otherwise services such as Amazon or DnsMadeEasy are even cheaper. Only at the 2500€/month does the service really get viable if you are a huge user.
The free tier is nice, but it doesn't last very long, especially thanks to the weird query counts.
I must point out that Rage4 was kind of enough to offer us the old price of 1€/mil even for a new domain, but I'm comparing the pricing listed on the page here.
I would give this 1/5 if there wasn't for their FREE tier. For a single site with a lot of bandwidth, their DNS is multiple times more expensive than the server itself.
Performance (3/5):
I thought their performance was quite nice until recently really when I did a few more tests to see if we can reach a similar performance with less servers. I noticed that queries take anywhere from 30-1200ms with them depending on the location and maybe.. cache? It's usually around 30-300ms in EU/US. We are now testing our own solution that with only 3 anycast servers on BuyVM decreased the resolution time in the US/EU to ~50-150ms and in Asia it's slower, but approximately the same in some locations.
I'm not sure if this is caused by the GeoDNS lookups, but it's sometimes quite slow.
Support (5/5):
First, I must say I'm quite easily satisfied with support.
They always responded fairly quickly (within a day?) and offered helpful advice and as I mentioned allowed us to use the old pricing tier of 1€/mil. I'm not very fond of one-liner responses, but in the end I always got what I wanted.
Overall I'd say I'm quite satisfied, but @gbshouse drop your price! :P
Comments
I edited the performance part a bit since I first posted. It was wrong a bit, just wanted to point that out
Thanks for review, it's always nice to see that someone is happy with our service.
We would be more than happy to drop the price if we would be backed up by large capital like Amazon. (Un)fortunately we are small, self funded, family owned business and we need to keep prices on certain level. If your zone requires large number of requests (when using GeoDNS or failover) you can always move to one of the flat fee packages.
Regarding performance we are constantly improving our infrastructure and network performance (for example last evening we have added completely new setup in Japan).
Edit: one more thing regarding request counting - we only count requests actually processed by our backends, the results served from local cache (unfortunately not yet distributes) are not counted
@gbshouse
I really don't want to look too negative, because I really do like Rage4, so complaining about these things make me cringe a little.
Your pricing has increased a lot this year actually, you used to offer a 30€ unlimited plan or something like that. Which of course is unsustainable, but now you changed that to 15mil queries for 30€.
What's bothering me about the performance isn't the number of locations that you have. Those look great, but for example I just did a test from Tokyo: Query time: 565 msec and 1 minute earlier it was 140 msec. It looks like certain requests are returned from cache quite quickly, while others take a while.
The joys of 5+ anycast locations but less than 100+. Depending on carrier you'll see that with every CDN/anycast provider.
@BunnySpeed - please remember that our network is optimized for communication with public DNS servers, for end users it might not look perfect (comparing with recursive DNS or CDN networks)
@Fusl - true, true, I had to code small AI for route optimization
@gbshouse
What I'm interested in is why/how almost every review/thread I see about you guys (and my experiences as well), indicate inflated/strange query counts.
While I'm not trying to accuse you guys of any intentional funny business, don't you feel it warrants another visit at how the queries are counted?
@Jonchun queries about your domain name are generally out of your control ? Even if you keep the domain secret? I suppose that's the best explanation.
Well yea, but domains at other DNS providers never generate several thousand queries within hours of signing up. It just seems to be isolated to Rage4's counting. (It's pretty damn consistent too)
** Deleted to not cause confusion when someone finds this.
You aren't really comparing apples to apples @BunnySpeed, small thing can make a big change.
Thus the big bold letters explaining that there might be something wrong and that it's not a 100% comparison. However, it's a huge difference nevertheless. And.. In 2014 I was using amazon, then immediately switched to Rage4. The query count jumped from 2 million per month to.. What do you think? 13 million.
Perhaps they should consider adding such a debugging feature - log all queries for a domain for one minute. Then these queries can be shown to the customer, together with all the data - IP addresses, time received, etc. And the customer can do the counting himself.
I've already explained this several times but well let's do it again:
Few details regarding our infrastructure: each location contains at least 3 DNS nodes, each DNS node contains DNS server and database. The DNS server itself have local cache so responses with TTL higher the certain level are cached for few minutes. If request hits our backend it's counted, if not it's not counted. On router level we do ECMP BGP load balancing. Unfortunately since we are using local cache (and not distributed) not all responses are served from cache - let's say IP a.b.c.d makes request, ECMP sends it to node1, response is served and cached, then b.c.d.e makes the same request but ECMP send it to node2 which doesn't have response in cache. The ECMP is done on Linux Kernel level (@rds100 you remember the story with kernels > 3.8 right?). Additionally the same behavior is for IPv6. We've done some experiments with distributed cache but results are poor (at least not suitable for high performance DNS ).
Hope that this will give you some insight how it works (and yes I've coded most of the stuff myself so I'm 100% sure what's inside
).
The routes to their anycast have always been confusing to me: http://ping.pe/ns1.r4ns.net
It looks like it has improved a little, but it is still odd that Dallas gets 30ms but Atlanta gets 150ms. Most of the US locations are pretty bad.
@BunnySpeed Have you looked at getting a partner account? I have an IWStack account and its comes with a free Rage4 partner account that seems to have 100m queries per zone. If 2€/mil queries is really the price they say its worth then the partner account is worth quite a lot.
EDIT: Removed response times, my testing was erroneous.
That would raise privacy issues. Suddenly Rage4 would have logs of what particular person, to an IP level was browsing and when.
Maybe as an advanced opt-in feature?
And with a small retention period
I was thinking from a website visitor point of view + all the legal compliance, privacy policies, etc. Not to mention that it's a global service, so data export inside/outside EU/US and other countries, each with different law, nah, just too much legal burden for my personal taste :-).
So what if you point your domain to your own name servers and run tcpdump, is this a different privacy issue?
Of course the logging wouldn't be active all the time, it would be activated on request by the customer for his own domain and would only be active for one minute.
We are also using rage4 along with Amazon route for our cdn. No downtimes so far but Amazon latency feature has an edge over them .
I am also using them for some of my projects and really happy! @gbshouse Thanks for the good service..
It's not as simple, as this is not you, but a third party, processing, exchanging and storing the data that are later transferred over the ocean. I'm not a lawyer, just saying that if I'd be Rage4, I wouldn't sail these waters.
Really? I just noticed this..
3€ + VAT for 1,1mil DNS queries?
First of all 250k queries should be free. No? Shouldn't this mean a 1€ charge + 1€ for the zone?
I don't even know what to say. I've been testing different DNS options and the query count is also much lower all of a sudden.
Not sure if I'm ever coming back... This is way too expensive not to mention it's all starting to look kind of shady.
@gbshouse
@BunnySpeed
For what it's worth:
dnsmadeeasy.com for $30 a year you get 10 domains and 5 million queries included and what is very likely the fastest Anycast DNS around.
I have 9 domains and average about 200K queries a month. These are not very busy sites, but they are not dead.
Thanks
I'm aware they are great, but I'm just wondering what the hell Rage4 is doing. I had such a good opinion (except for the price) of them before but it just went poof.
Their high query count has been an issue since day one.
I have never been their client, just seen lots of posts about this.
EDIT: nevermind, figured it out.
@BunnySpeed
It will be interesting to see how they come up with their final numbers.
http://web.archive.org/web/20140703184228/https://rage4.com/Home/DNS
It seems that the 1€ charge is still there and the 250k free usage is ignored. Great.
Basically it's free, unless you use it all, then it's paid.
I edited the original comments in order not to spread wrong info.