EveryDNS was founded in June 2001 by DNS expert David Ulevitch, providing free DNS services to the Internet community. From their website:
We provide static DNS services as well as many advanced services such as Dynamic DNS resolution, Secondary service, AXFR service, and domain2web redirection. Of course, our primary service is free DNS.
New sign ups can get 20 domains and 200 records hosted for free. If you support them with once-off donation, these limitation will be lifted. EveryDNS currently hosts 92,000+ domains and 250,000+ records at the time of writing — that certainly marks them one of the biggest free DNS providers on the Internet.
I have been using EveryDNS since late 2002 when I launched a blog service for church friends. Since then I have been a very happy user and currently have three domains hosted on their DNS.
They have 4 servers in 4 different locations to provide great redundancy. Backend was developed with DJB’s TinyDNS, Perl and MySQL. Have I mentioned that EveryDNS was funded by David Ulevitch of the OpenDNS fame? He is someone who cares about stopping the bad guys from abusing the DNS system, and someone you can trust your domain name hosting with.
Being a popular host of free services, they did have a few issues over the years. They has been DDoS’ed (not their fault), registry entry hacked (stupid registrar!) and SQL injection exploit discovered (which they fix under 24 hours). Not bad for a free service.
User Interface
Signing up with EveryDNS is easy — because they probably have one of the most simplistic user interface. Put in your username, email address and password, and you are ready to go.
When you log in you will be presented with your domains on the left column, and options to add new domains. You can either add primary domains (“basic”) or other advanced options like secondary, dynamic and “webhop” domains, where it does web forwarding for you.
Once a domain has been created or selected, right column will be populated with records associated with that domain. You can delete existing records, add new records or set up AXFR (Asynchronous Full Transfer Zone) options.
Adding records is easy. Fill in the FQDN, record type, value, TTL and in the case of MX records the priority, hit “Add Record” and it gets added into the database. Usually the new records will appear in ns1.everydns.net within a few seconds, and will be propagated to other NS pretty soon afterwards.
Extra Features
EveryDNS can act as secondary NS, or as primary NS with another DNS server acting as secondary NS. These are useful if you wish to provide redundancy by utilising other DNS servers not part of EveryDNS. It also supports dynamic DNS, which you can change A record of one of your domains dynamically. A Perl script or Windows executable are provided for this functionality.
It also supports “webhop” which is just web forwarding.
Extra functionality in EveryDNS is a bit limited. There is also some limitation on TTL value (minimum is 120 seconds even for donating users) and record type (only the most basic is supported). However, these should not affect you using EveryDNS to set up websites and mail servers.
There is however a PHP API for EveryDNS, so you can program your own front end with it.
DNS Servers
EveryDNS has 4 servers (ns{1,2,3,4}.everydns.net), 3 in US and 1 in Europe. From their home page:
NS1 is in San Diego, while NS2 is in San Jose, NS3 is in the Netherlands, and NS4 is in Washington, D.C.
There is also a map showing where EveryDNS’s servers are.
Summary
| Name: | EveryDNS |
|---|---|
| Server Locations: | San Diego (US), San Jose (US), Netherlands, Washington DC (US) |
| Servers per Zone: | 4 |
| Free Domains: | 20 |
| Free Records: | 200 |
| Record Types: | A, CNAME, MX, NS, TXT |
| Min. TTL: | 120 seconds (only with donation) |
| AXFR: | Yes (IP) |
| Secondary NS: | Yes |
| Dynamic Domain: | Yes |
| Web Forward: | Yes (Redirect) |
| Mail Forward: | No |
| Secondary MX: | No |
Conclusion
I highly recommend EveryDNS’s service. Besides unbeatable price, it has 4 geographical diversified servers providing great redundancy. Basic set of features, and “enough” domains and records. Moreover, I trust David U with his experience in managing domain name servers.
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Comments
woot! Thanks for the review. I think we’ll even find some time to add some features to EveryDNS like editing records and supporting TXT records. Editing TTLs is probably easy to turn on too. As always, we do things that won’t make us any less stable and reliable. :-)
-david
I’ve used Everydns for years. Most people have no need for further DNS “features” than what they provide, and the interface is brilliantly simple.
TXT support was added a while back.
I appreciate the simple service so much I’ve donated.
suddenly, it seems that everydns cannot add new domain as secondary anymore.
@dennyhalim, I experienced the same problem today, no way to add new domain as secondary. once thought that was my Firefox problem :(
Scott,
Thank you for the review. I was looking for a managed DNS solution (it seems that DNSMadeEasy won’t accept new customers at this time) and I’m giving EveryDNS a try. I wasn’t sure if I could rely on a free service, but reading your review made me a bit more confident.
Way to go David! If everything goes smoothly I’ll donate to the project.
My “webhop” abilities at EverDNS suddenly disappeared and I cannot get it working again. I’ve sent numerous emails to EveyDNS but they do not respond or fix the problem….
Looking for another host
Yep, I’ve sent them many emails recently and they haven’t answered any of them. I have paid through paypal, but that doesn’t seem to matter either.
More urgently, today my CNAMEs that point to google all stopped working — from 2 of the everydns.net name servers. NS1 and NS4 both send back return code 3, indicating a name error for any lookup of my CNAMEs. NS2 and NS3 return normal answers.
And again, no response from their support address. :-(
Also also looking for another place to park DNS, jon
I too am facing a peculiar problem with everydns.net This monday when I treid to log in to my account , I kept getting a message saying login failed try again!
I was sure that i was entering the right password. even reseting the password and trtying to log in with the new password dint allow me in
i then sent a mail to david, who i believe happened to be online at that time. ‘cause he promplty replied back and rectified my problem. I thought that it would be the end of my problem
I WAS WRONG!! I try to log in today and lo behold!! access denied again I AGAIN sent them a mail a couple of hours back and now I have my access back
Something is wrong with EveryDNS for sure
Does EveryDNS even answer their support email? I emailed them several times about questions, none of which were ever answered and now I see i can’t even visit the EveryDNS webpage (especially since I just donated some money).
Updated my MX records last night. The settings are correct in their UI, but if you “dig” on any of their servers, all 4 still have yesterdays records. Awaiting a support e-mail and still nothing. I guess you get what you pay for.
I’ve also noticed problems with EveryDNS in the past few months. It was mostly stuff related to their admin area, such as random server errors and pages reloading without actually saving my updated records. And once, the site wouldn’t let me add a new domain because it thought it was already in the system. Anyway, I was going to donate to the service, but the recent problems were enough to make me pack up and move to greener DNS pastures. I’m using my host’s DNS now (Slicehost), and I couldn’t be happier.
It’s a shame, too, because I really liked EveryDNS for a while there.
Same here, there must be something serious going on with everydns.net. Emails asking for credit for a donation I made have gone unanswered and the site is sporadically unreachable (even as I type this).
I really hope this service can survive because it’s very useful and worth paying for (I personally prefer something more “vanilla” than opendns). DNS maintenance and support needs to be bulletproof, something everydns has failed at lately.
I have used for the longest time zoneedit.com, about 6 years. I think their service is really outstanding.
I was also testing the waters with EveryDNS.net because they had been around for a while and were getting good reviews. The system seems to work good, but support is non-existent. I have tried 3 times to contact them to find out why my donation has not been reflected in my account and have received no answer. Problem for me is that without that donation being shown in the profile some of the functions are not available.
Same as above — tried it out based on article on this site. Made a donation WEEKS ago … has never reflected in my account; no response from anyone.
Don’t know if the service has been down; using it as a secondary to another provider.
Same as the rest have experienced - I donated in April 2008, never got credit, and no one answers support emails. I’ve even tried David U’s personal email account to no avail. It’s a bit insulting that the site’s account manager continues to tell me that I haven’t donated.
Still, it seems to be a decent service and I’ve had zero DNS reliability issues even though the website seems a little flukey at times. It is certainly worthy of the money I donated, but don’t expect the service limits to be removed if you donate. It won’t happen.
Sorry to hear about that. I’ve donated to EveryDNS ages ago but I guess their focus is on OpenDNS at the moment.
It certainly is, and one can only wonder how long it is until he gets bored with the OpenDNS project and abandons millions more users. There’s just no acceptable excuse for abandoning the EveryDNS project. Too many people depend on it for him to treat it this way. Not to mention, it’s akin to thievery to trick people into donating for services they’ll never receive.
That’s a bit harsh, but if you feel I’ve stolen from you, just email me and I’ll give you your money back.
We have over 100,000 active users… but we also have some rough spots which we’re working hard to improve. I’m sorry if you felt ignored or neglected.
We sucked for a while, I admit it. The service was rock-solid but support was non-existent. I’ve been fixing it. If you email support today you get a response. Guaranteed. If you don’t, email me personally, my email is easy to find.
As for keeping the rarely-used services running like WebHop, we’re working on making them as robust as our primary DNS service.
I’ve brought on two guys who are coding and helping on support and turning EveryDNS back into the world-class DNS service it once was, and will be again.
If you are interested in being a part of it, drop me a line.
Everydns is unreachable for me at the moment (sept 19/ 1:45 pacific) and you also cannot direct to our site www.biggunsproductions.com (which I just tried to use in this form and it gave the error message “The URL of your homepage is not valid. Remember that it must be fully qualified, i.e. of the form http://example.com/directory.” Well - yes - that is exactly the problem)
Is anyone else having the same issue at the moment?
is everydns.net down in all regions or are we just not able to access the website in NA?
I’m the author of the “akin to thievery” comment above, and whether or not you think it’s harsh David, it was spot on. There was no way to email support and there was no way to email you, as you never responded to either. I tried several different EveryDNS and personal email addresses, all with no response whatsoever. There was just no way to get your donations credited to get your account features upgraded. The donated money was just gone. That’s fact.
But, credit where credit is due… The service has indeed remained solid during this time (although occasionally the website falters, the DNS servers never do), and it looks like the support issues are being cleared up. The new web helpdesk is very nice, and issues are being responded to now, and quickly. I was also finally credited me for the donation I made back in April. (I had to ask again and provide proof of the donation, but at least it was done this time.)
Welcome back David. I’m glad to see you taking on the problems and acknowledging that things “sucked for a while”. Admitting that goes a long way towards reparations.
Have you tried the new support system? Log in to your EveryDNS account and click the Support link at the bottom of the page. Or send an email to support@everydns.com. I’ll probably be the one writing you back. Include your account name and PayPal Transaction ID and we’ll get your donation credited ASAP. That goes for anyone who has not had their donation credited, just drop us an email, we will get it credited.
You can actually visit the support system at support.everydns.com, but you’ll need to log in to your EveryDNS account to view your tickets.
I’m currently looking for free DNS services and I stumbled across at this place. I’ll compare it with other services. Thanks for your review.
I used a paid dns hosting service for some time which I was very happy with but their prices kept increasing and I had to pay for services I would never use. After looking around and reading this review I decided to try EveryDNS.
Signing up was easy, and they don’t try to collect a lot of unnecessary personal information. (Not collecting it to begin with is worth much more than promises made by some not to sell it to spammers and other data mining ilk.)
Setting up the service was fairly easy, but really assumes either you really know what you are doing, (I do) or that you are doing a very simple setup. But, it could be much easier if they had a decent FAQ or a some kind of knowledge base section to explain a few details about how their system works and maybe even setting up DNS service in general.
In my case I was trying to use EveryDNS as a secondary DNS service, which may be a little less common. I never could get their servers to communicate correctly with mine, and the problem seemed to be comming from their side. I did get a quick initial response from support, but as soon as it was apparent that the problem might be something more than just not getting the configuration correct, I never heard anything else from support.
I then tried EditDNS.net and got things going without any problem. Later, I noticed an issue with the control interface on their website, mentioned it on a support fourm on a weekend, and, it was acknowledged and fixed that same weekend.
I didn’t donate to EveryDNS, although I had intended to once I was sure things would actually work. It wasn’t that I needed to remove any limits, I just believe in paying for what I get.
EveryDNS is probably fine for most people who have a simple setup and just need a set of servers somewhere to point to, but from my experience, I’d suggest you look at EditDNS.net as well. It provides a pretty complete free service. I haven’t yet, but you can remove limitations with a subscription and also get paid support. They have a much better knowledge base/FAQ. Also, from what I’ve seen of their free support forum, if you can ask a question which hasn’t been asked and answered 10 times already, there is a pretty good chance that it will get answered by someone from EditDNS, even though officially it is a forum made up of users.
I think it might be useful to readers here to see a review of EditDNS so that they could make some comparisons.
I heard of everyDNS and tried it out. The sign up was easy and straight forward. However, after I punch in the wrong info, I decided to delete the account and to re-sign up. Unfortunately after I deleted the account, it didn’t clean up the domain properly and now it said that my domain already exist in the database. Sent email to support for help and no reply. Tried to read up the FAQ, but the FAQ website didnt’ work. So I went ahead and did a test setup a different domain as a secondary and it never get populated.
I was hoping that after testing it out and if everything is working properly, I would donate toward the project. Anyone has problem with everyDNS?
Read through the posts above. There have been lots of people having problems with EveryDNS.
They had an outage on March 23. On their website they said a writeup would be “forthcomming”. Well… 3 weeks later and they haven’t even said anything about in the “news” link on their site. However, the notice about the “forthcomming” explanation was taken down. The effort to put it up and take it down could hardly have been more than it would have taken to at least put a two or three sentence acknowledgment on the news page.
Unless you donate the service is free so there isn’t a lot of basis for complaining, but it seems that the people running EveryDNS have got it running on an automated basis which makes sense, but it is now an extremely low priority.
David did do a write-up on Twitter. I’m not sure there was really much more to say. A lot of the latest announcements haven’t been posted to the news page, but are now going through the Twitter account. I’ll see if we can get that information posted to the news page as well.
I will tell you that people are working on EveryDNS and things are moving forward. And while most of the functionality of the site is automated, support isn’t. I should know, I’m the one doing it.
Um… Twitter? Ok… That should tell me all I need to know about the level of professionalism I could expect from EveryDNS. But if it didn’t then using “cuz” in a “write-up” to explain why a DNS service used by a huge number of people went down certainly does.
Umm yeah, using twitter to update news about your site is probably not the best but hey that’s me. I do however know that I’ve been having a problem with webhops recently..for about a week now (ok 6 days exactly because that is when I put the ticket in) and as of yet have yet to hear anything back from support..status is “Awaiting assignment to help desk personnel”. Now I’ve donated, and up to now it’s been rock solid, but I can’t have sites unreachable for over a week without any word from support..
I’d be hard pressed to recommend the service now, even for free.
I’m having the same problem.
I’m trying to add the domain and it said it already exist in the database.
Is it possible that other account has registered my domain? How can I request to delete from the other account?
I really need to use everydns and can even donate.
My e-mail is bernardorhee@gmail.com
Thank you,
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