Yesterday I wrote about DNS & whether to do it in-house or outsource to a third-party.  I have done some more research on the 5 DNS hosting companies I’m zeroing in on – UltraDNS, DNS Made Easy, EasyDNS, Akamai, and Dyn.  Basically I put together a list of the top ten sites for which each hosts DNS.  Here’s what I found (listed alphabetically).

Akamai

DNS Made Easy

Dynect (Dyn)

Easy DNS

UltraDNS

Obviously UltraDNS is the biggest – both in number of sites for which they host DNS (I found 441 of 10,000), and total monthly pageviews.  in fact, all 10 of their biggest sites are in the top 100.  The other four listed here have an impressive number of sites & page views (which translates into DNS queries) as well.  While I’m still evaluating each of these on many aspects I do know biggest isn’t always best.

NOTE: If you read my previous post you may have noticed that Amazon is listed as providing their own DNS services, but here they are listed under UltraDNS.  That’s because the list from my previous post was comprised from information where I only analyzed the authoritative name server, whereas this list includes secondary, tertiary, etc.  Amazon (and certainly others) uses more than one DNS provider, which is a very good idea.  See this excellent post, “DOS Attacks and DNS: How to Stay Up If Your DNS Provider goes DOWN,” by Mark Jeftovic, founder of EasyDNS.

More later. . .