What are the Benifits of Running Your Own DNS?

baileyjs asks: "I help run a small web development firm, and we are always trying to save money, but not at the cost of service to our customers. We currently purchase DNS services from our ISP, but are looking at getting our own rack. I was going to put some DNS servers there when I saw that Network Solutions offers free DNS. All our of domains (about 150) are currently on Network Solutions, so transfer is not an issue. Why shouldn't I use Network Solutions? Why should I build my own? What reasons, besides 'Network Solutions is Evil', can I give my boss?"

Comments

Netsol costs more.

[Inoshiro]

For a pithy 150 domains, setup TinyDNS. It takes about 20 minutes to download/compile/install. There are plenty of helpful guides to setting up the software.

If you are unsure about the format, use a zone-xfer to get them to TinyDNS format. Then your DNS is 100% under your control (easy updating!), cost effective (TinyDNS needs to maintenance), and has a light impact on the server (usually 1 second of CPU time for every few days + a few hundred kb of HD space). On top of that, you can transfer your registrations to an alternative registrar (like Joker) which would be cheaper in the long run.

Remember backup DNS.

[MindStalker]

I'd recommend you set up your own DNS and use network solutions as the backup DNS.
Remember that the backup DNS really shouldn't be geographically located near the primary. Even though 9/10 they are on the same network sadly.

Benefits of hosting DNS

[mnmn]

For one, you can have as many lines and zones as you want. Which means you can have many subdomains and many subsubdomains. Hosting providers usually put a cap, and I've seen some caps are horrific (only 5 subdomains).

I am hosting 7 domains, and 2 of the domains have 20 subdomains each. A friend on a different ISP hosts my secondary and I host his. Quite honestly, with a static IP, you dont really need DNS services at all, unless youre virtualhosting, in which case self-hosting DNS is best since you send out zones once, and just leave it there. They only change when you edit the zones.

Running BIND on a static IP server and not changing anything has low overhead, and it doesnt take much skill or time. However if youre only hosting 2 domains, not too many subdomains, usually the hosting providers offer a basic DNS service for free. Might as well use that till you hit their cap.

Re:Home DNS?

[sd3]

I started running DNS at home when all I had was a desktop PC and a dialup PPP connection. To tell the truth, I forget exactly why I felt it necessary to start running it, but now that there are (ahem) considerably more than one computer in the house, DNS is indispensible. You asked about benefits?

• Only have to maintain one set of name tables, not N copies of a hosts file (even with two machines it gets annoying)
• Makes internal DHCP a lot easier for about the same reason
• Can carve out your own section of a (resolvable) domain if e.g. you work from home and want to send professional email through your ISP without everything going out as ...@comcast.net.
• Feeling of control? Makes it very easy to change or assign multiple names to the same host to better indicate its function? (e.g. host named "squid" and "proxy" as well as its actual hostname)

I installed on Debian 1.2 back in the day and it was pretty trivial. Did it more recently on OpenBSD 3.2 and still trivial. The only thing you have to do, unless you want to actually learn the gory details of BIND, is to start with a skeleton zone/reverse-lookup file and fill it out from there. As I recall, Debian's was very easy to modify.

In similar vein I also recommend running squid locally and surfing through it. Yes I know your browser is so au courant and caches everything but squid presents a consistent, persistent(ish) cache in case you need to serve multiple browsers.