12

I have my website set up as an EC2 instance and my DNS is currently Godaddy. I'm considering switching to Amazon AWS Route53 for DNS.

The one thing I noticed however is that Route53 charges monthly fees but I never get any bills from Godaddy. Obviously, nobody likes getting charged for something they can get for free.

If Godaddy is cheaper, can anyone confirm that the page load speed of an EC2 instance is actually better via Route53 vs. Godaddy? If it is not faster or cheaper, can someone point out other reasons it might make sense to do this switch?

thanks, tim

tim peterson
  • 693

2 Answers2

16

Short answer - If you don't know reasons yourself, you probably don't need to switch - just stick with whatever you use.

Route53 may be more reliable, may be faster, have some features that help integrate it with other AWS services, but you don't need any of it. If you care about the difference between 99.9% and 99.7% availbility, or if you care about 100ms vs 150ms latency, maybe it makes sense to start comparing DNS services.

Btw, GoDaddy also offers premium DNS, paid monthly. And also there are many DNS providers with prices ranging from free to hundreds of dollars monthly.

Some of things to consider when choosing DNS provider: real uptime, uptime SLA, response time (around the world - wherever your visitors reside, and around the clock), limits - like amount of queries or number of records or minimum TTL, price, features like DNSSEC, IPv6, dynamic DNS, account security features, supported record types, geo-DNS or load-balancing/failover, API etc.etc. - just look at specs of various DNS providers and you will see what features may be different.

Again, it's all small details. When you drive for a rally or operate twitter.com you double-check every detail. But if you just drive to your office and back, you aren't ought to know whether your engine is direct-injection or carburetor.

d3corator
  • 103
Sandman4
  • 4,125
10

I really wouldn't recommend hosting DNS with Godaddy if you depend on having your site available 99.99% of the time. Godaddy has pretty much the worst uptime around

Godady has an uptime of 99.966 http://uptime.besthostratings.com/viewreport.php?host=GoDaddy

Compared to Amazon Route 53, which has an uptime of 99.9978 http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2012/08/comparison-and-analysis-of-managed-dns.html

On occasion Godaddy had an outage that cost one website an estimated $50,000 in lost sales. This outage may have also been the result of an attack by anonymous, or a network equipment failure. www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/godaddy-outage-anonymous-attack-or-it-fa/240007167

Godaddy's DNS has also been the target of many blocks, particularly in China. www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1160554

There are a couple DNS providers that are probably ever so slightly better than Route53, but Amazon's service is the most affordable by far.

Lakatos Gyula
  • 103
Milo
  • 201