DNS Hosting Part II

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

Domain Rank US Monthly People
hulu.com 36 21M+
ehow.com 37 21M+
match.com 43 19M+
sears.com 113 9.2M
verizon.com 130 8.4M
ticketmaster.com 160 7.4M
reddit.com 203 6.1M
kmart.com 207 5.9M
plentyoffish.com 221 5.6M
funnyordie.com 234 5.4M

DNS Made Easy

Domain Rank US Monthly People
suite101.com 88 11M+
city-data.com 94 10M+
wisegeek.com 120 8.7M+
formspring.me 147 7.7M+
grindtv.com 195 7.1M+
rockyou.com 206 6M+
articlesbase.com 220 5.7M+
bbb.org 279 4.6M+
woot.com 320 4.2M+
ustream.tv 323 4M+

Dynect (Dyn)

Domain Rank US Monthly People
twitter.com 20 44M+
netflix.com 61 14M+
twitpic.com 83 11M+
wikia.com 87 11M+
simplyhired.com 96 10M+
bleacherreport.com 129 8.4M+
indeed.com 136 8.2M+
scribd.com 163 7.3M+
metrolyrics.com 167 7.2M+
drugs.com 184 6.6M+

Easy DNS

Domain Rank US Monthly People
buzznet.com 287 4.5M+
oodle.com 370 unknown
sidereel.com 413 3.6M+
metafilter.com 455 3.2M+
cduniverse.com 495 3M+
xomba.com 521 2.9M
urbanspoon.com 608 2.6M+
daylife.com 611 2.6M+
backtype.com 663 2.4M+
datpiff.com 724 2.2M+

UltraDNS

Domain Rank US Monthly People
amazon.com 7 74M+
walmart.com 26 28M+
imdb.com 33 24M+
linkedin.com 38 21M+
webmd.com 39 20M+
mtv.com 54 16M+
digg.com 62 14M+
washingtonpost.com 74 12M+
zynga.com 76 12M+
bizrate.com 78 12M+

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. . .

2 thoughts on “DNS Hosting Part II

  1. Rick, I haven't made a decision yet as I've been tied up with other projects. I'm hoping to resolve this dilemma in the next week or two & when I do I'll post it here. Thanks.

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