After EveryDNS and EditDNS's outage, I have finally got my act together to have this redundant and free DNS running for some of my domains. I know both EveryDNS and EditDNS have 4 geographically separated servers, however during the event when the vendor is targeted for DDoS, I am still suffering downtime when their servers stuggle to stay alive. Therefore, instead of having your zone resiting on only one free DNS provider, you can get your domain hosted by both of them. Therefore just in case all servers of one provider get DDoS'ed, your domain can still stay visible on the net as the servers from the other provider are still answering requests.

Is EditDNS dead? Their website is not responding, nor are their 4 DNS servers. Since the DDoS attack at EveryDNS late last year, I have moved some of my domains to EditDNS, another free DNS provider that I have not yet had a chance to review. It is actually the first complete outage I have observed from EditDNS, and with all 4 servers out of reach, you wonder what is happening to them. Another DDoS?

As I have suggested in my previous post that it might be a good idea to build secondary DNS utilising other free DNS providers. Have I taken any action? No. Hopefully this EditDNS incident would teach me some lessons.

Domain name resolution is a very important building block of the Internet today. It translates domain/host names into IP addresses, so your browser would know how to reach this page (okay, I know it is more complicated than that, but…)

At the same time, a slow or broken DNS system can be very frustrating, even when you are just hosting a service. Little did I realise that how much a typical hosting server depends on domain name services. If you are on a Linux/Unix box, try to remove /etc/resolv.conf from your server for 5 minutes, and see how it can cope.

Just read the latest post on OpenDNS blog, How OpenDNS saved Caio’s job — Caio from Brazil used OpenDNS when his ISP’s DNS server was down, and was able to complete his job.

Similar event happened to me today. No, it did not save my job — it was not work related. Let’s just say that OpenDNS has saved my day.

ZoneEdit.com has led a long history in free DNS hosting service. It is reliable, feature rich and free for the first 5 zones you hosted with them. They do quite a bit more than simply returning you the DNS records. Here’s a description from their FAQ page:

What services does ZoneEdit provide?

ZoneEdit hosts reliable DNS servers, e-mail servers for email forwarding, and web servers for URL forwarding and parked domains. ZoneEdit provides a convenient single-location, integrated, web-based domain manager for configuring all of the services provided.

I have been using ZoneEdit since late 2002, and currently have 2 domains delegated to their servers. In one stage (~2 years ago) the web front-end was giving me hard time, but the DNS itself has been flawless. If you like free services, has less than 5 domains to manage, want features like backup MX and automatic failover service — then ZoneEdit might be the provider for you.

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.

Registrar can’t do DNS for you? Need your domain name information hosted? Prefer free lunch? All my domains (around 10+) have been hosted on free DNS servers over the years, and most of them are very reliable. I will be sharing some of these free DNS hosting in this article.