High-quality inexpensive hosted DNS service

yowza

The Opportunity
I'm exploring an opportunity to build a service similar to zerigo.com on top of the global DNS Anycast platform of a major internet player. Because I would not need to build out and manage the infrastructure myself, I could provide services for substantially less than other providers. These cost savings would be passed on to my customers.

I'd really appreciate some feedback so I can determine the level of interest in a service like this. I'm not even convinced there is there room in the market for another DNS player. It seems to me that there might be an opportunity for a service similar to zerigo.com if it had less expensive pricing. What do you think?

The DNS Hosting Plan
If a service offered a hosted DNS plan such as the following, would it interest you?

• At least 500 domains and possibly more
• Unlimited queries per month
• Beautiful user interface (web 2.0, ajax, etc.)
• Full REST API
• Global network of DNS servers
• Servers operated by very large and reputable provider
• Geo location load balancing
• Instant updates
• Zone file imports
• Wildcard hostnames
• External master/slave support

At what price point would that plan interest you? $200/yr? $100/yr? $50/year? Less? More? I realize everyone would want it as cheap as possible, but I'd like to know the price point at which you would no longer be interested in the service because it is too expensive. This will help me to work the numbers to see if a service like this would be sustainable.

Equivalent plans at Zerigo include the Plus 15 with 400 domains for $708/year or FOUR of the Essentials 4 plans (120 domains at $99/year) providing 480 domains for $396/year. Note Zerigo pricing depends on number of queries, while the plan I suggest is unlimited queries.

I should be able to match or beat most of Zerigo's features, except that I would not be able to provide vanity or whitelabel DNS servers. This is due to a limitation of the DNS platform I would use. How important are vanity DNS servers? Would that be a deal-breaker?

Do you have just a few domains and can make do with free or inexpensive providers, or do you manage lots of domains? I assume that this type of service would primarily interest hosters with many domains to manage.

Have I left out any critical features or services that you would need? Any suggestions to make it better?

I don't want to move forward if there isn't a need, so please respond with your thoughts!

Thanks!
Tauren

maxexcloo

I'd pay $10/year (maximum) for 200 domains (this is LEB after all!)

marrco

a dealbreaker for me is having the same domain name as all other customers. What will you do when ns1.yourservice will be under ddos attack?

in 2012 i expect to receive a pair of nsXXX.yourservice, so that when a customer of yours get his nsXXX ddosed you're able to mitigate that without impacting much all other customers.

second negative point is using a provider that just started, so i hope you will impress me explaining why your DNS service is better than dnsmadeeasy or the free cloudfront service, that provides dns services too, or amazon route 53.

Price is not the dealmaker for me. All registrar (ie. internetbs.net) offer free dns servers, then i have quite a few LEBs so i can run bind/nsd3/powerdns.

Go59954

@maxexcloo said: I'd pay $10/year (maximum) for 200 domains (this is LEB after all!)

Nice, but might be too low (taking into consideration the price of some paid DNS service) so I would go more flexible, and get a cheap plan if it's:

• $10-20/year
• 20-50 domains
• Unlimited queries

But even though, I guess it's nearly impossible with a full-featured service as described.

giang

@maxexcloo said: I'd pay $10/year (maximum) for 200 domains (this is LEB after all!)

$10/year is good to go for LEBers Cloudns.net was offered $10/year and $15/2years. But when I was going to extend my premium, they increased the price to $2/month =(

jh

I can see this working

drmike

You're also competing against the free providers as well. You're going to have to show visitors why they should use your service when they can go over to another provider and get the same thing for free.

edit: Seriously. Off to bellringing.

Christian

@giang said: $10/year is good to go for LEBers Cloudns.net was offered $10/year and $15/2years. But when I was going to extend my premium, they increased the price to $2/month =(

Yes, cloudns.net is great, I was also wondering the new pricing structure, but I think the service is worth 2 bucks a month.

Go59954

@Christian said: Yes, cloudns.net is great, I was also wondering the new pricing structure, but I think the service is worth 2 bucks a month.

Among too many listed high-quality features up there, I'm curious to know if cloudns offered Geo location load balancing and Unlimited queries per month for the $15/y or $2/m plan?

As I've seen one or more relatively expensive solutions, while queries/month is limited to just 100,000.

Christian

@Go59954 said: Among too many listed high-quality features up there, I'm curious to know if cloudns offered Geo location load balancing and Unlimited queries per month for the $15/y or $2/m plan?

They have no domain and no query limits. They got servers in the Netherlands, Germany, Bulgaria and the US. They also have an API, so you can easily integrate it with other softwares aswell.

yowza

Thanks everyone for the feedback, it is very appreciated!

I get the impression that about $10 - $20/year is the price point at which a service like this becomes too expensive for LEBers. Several of you suggested $10/year, while others were willing to go up to $20/year. This is actually right in the range I expected to hear from LEB users.

I was aware of ClouDNS, but never used them before. They don't have premium pricing listed on their site, so thanks @Christian for providing more details. Their pricing of $24/year for unlimited domains reaffirms that $10 - $20/year is likely to be the right price point. However, they have the advantage of offering vanity DNS servers. Considering this, ClouDNS is probably the most important competition I should examine.

Also, several of you confirmed my worries that the biggest drawback to my service would be the lack of vanity servers. I have some ideas on how to possibly get around that.

Here's my take on the various DNS hosting options available. Keep in mind I'm looking at this from the perspective of customers who have 100+ domains, not those with 5 or 10:

• Hosting your own DNS servers gives the most flexibility, but still has higher costs even using LEBs. Consider a cheap LEB for $3/mo, you need at least 2 servers, which will be $72/year. Plus, it will also be only as good as you make it as you probably won't build a geo-aware anycast global network. And you have to manage it yourself, which isn't much fun when your VPS goes down and customers are calling.

• Most of the free or cheap DNS providers have really poor user interfaces and weak or non-existent APIs. Plus they tend to limit the number of domains to no more than 10 for free.

• A service like Zerigo provides a nice UI and good API, but as the number of domains and queries grow, the service can get expensive. The Plus 15 plan includes 400 domains, but costs over $700/year.

• DNS Made Easy is even more expensive, with their highest plan costing $1500/year for only 50 domains. Getting 400 domains with their Business plan would cost $790/year.

• Amazon Route 53 gets expensive for lots of domains. Base price of 500 domains would be $60/mo or $720/year, plus the cost of queries.

• CloudFlare includes DNS for free, but if you are a host with hundreds of domains, can you really get all your customers to use it?

• Registrars offer DNS hosting, but this doesn't work well if you want to offer DNS for your hosting customers without requiring them to switch registrars.

• You could piggyback on top of a VPS provider's DNS services. As long as you have a single server, you can host all your domains there. But the VPS providers service level can vary significantly and often don't offer APIs. Plus they might impose restrictions if they feel you are abusing the service.

• I hear lots of people use HE DNS services for free. But their website looks really bad and it doesn't look like they have an API. How does their service work and how good is it?

Have I left any other good options out?

In case you are interested, here's some stats on a few DNS services:

WildWestDomains - 31 million domains
http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/reports/total_domains/WILDWESTDOMAINS.COM

BlueHost - 1.5 million domains
http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/reports/total_domains/BLUEHOST.COM

Rackspace - 400,000 domains
http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/reports/total_domains/RACKSPACE.COM

DNSMadeEasy - 179,000 domains
http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/reports/total_domains/dnsmadeeasy.com

Linode - 98,000 domains
http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/reports/total_domains/linode.com

CloudFlare - 51,000 domains
http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/reports/total_domains/cloudflare.com

HE.net - 34,000 domains
http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/reports/total_domains/he.net

Zerigo - 20,000 domains
http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/reports/total_domains/zerigo.net

ClouDNS - 4,800 domains
http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/reports/total_domains/cloudns.net

Anyway, I appreciate everyone's response. You've provided me with some great feedback!

If I end up moving forward and launching this service, I'll let you know and include a 50% off discount for LEB users. Unfortunately, it is still too early to tell if this opportunity is worth pursuing.

Thanks,
Tauren