How to Compare Hosted DNS Providers (with Data!) – DNS.

My colleagues & I run a popular website and are constantly concerned with scaling and performance. Until last week, we had been running our own DNS servers (BIND) on Amazon EC2 instances.

We use Pingdom to monitor many functions of our servers, including DNS. What we saw was a resonable average resolution time of about 130ms, but frequent outliers higher than 500ms! The thought of a half-second penalty to the load time for first time visitors is not appealing. So we started to dig into the problem.