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.
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