When I chose ZoneEdit to handle all the DNS stuff for birdhouse, one of the criteria was that they use widely distributed servers for maximum reliability. When you set up a zone with them, the nameservers assigned are in different states, so if one has a power outage or failure, the other is still there to pick up the slack. The nameservers assigned to birdhouse were in New York and New Jersey. This, of course, became a problem when half the Eastern seaboard went down in yesterday’s power outage. So we had a frustrating service blackout yesterday. I moved birdhouse DNS over to dotster last night, but that change of course needed all night to percolate through the DNS tables.
Interestingly, each domain I’ve set up for customers gets assigned a different pair of nameservers, and most of those pairs had at least one machine stay up. So most of my customer sites kept right on running through the outage, even though they’re on the same machine.
I’m real happy with GKG.net for these services. So much so that I moved all of my employer’s domain registrations over to them, too (although we run our own DNS servers at work).
And for those concerned about what happened to ZoneEdit’s servers, note that GKG’s are in College Station, TX (primarily famous for being the home of Texas A&M Univ.). I noticed on the news last night that Texas and Oklahoma are on a seperate power grid from the Eastern *and* Western US ;)
David, if GKG’s are all in one city, you’re kind of screwed if the city loses power, right? I like ZoneEdit because they have DNS servers distributed all over the country. That fact didn’t help me yesterday, as it happens, because they weren’t distributed far enough – should have had one in Calif., one in NY or something. But normally, this is the kind of service you want to distribute widely for max security.
mneptok also pointed out domainmonger, which looks really good. And they do free DNS for all domains they register.
Being curious about this myself, I asked my acct contact at GKG. His response was:
“We do have geographically distributed locations across several counties. Furthermore, we have double back ups for power (batteries and generators). When Texas had it’s mini-blackout on April 15, our network was operational on battery and generators for nearly 15 hours.”
Made me feel a bit better :)