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Best DNS Service With API Access?
netaustin writes "My company runs quite a few media websites, mostly on Drupal, and about half on ec2. We have a good server setup with ec2 which allows us to route requests through Pound, a cluster of Varnish servers, then a cluster of Apache servers. We manage 50 domains (one per state) like this. Problem is, anytime things change, we have to manually adjust DNS for all 50 states, which is very boring and usually causes negative side effects too as we can't ever adjust all 50 DNS entries at once. We'd like to just change DNS providers and be done with it, but there are a lot of options, and I don't often shop for DNS services. I use EveryDNS for my personal domains, but I don't think they provide an API and it'd feel a little dishonest to reverse engineer the forms on their site since they're an esteemed donations-based service. I wouldn't feel bad about doing that to DNSPark, but they have a CAPTCHA image accompanying their login form, so goodbye DNSPark. I found a couple services that seem to do what I'm looking for, but they both feel a bit Microsoft-y and since I only want to change once, I want to get this right. Advice?"
Are we talking any sort of budget here, or does it have to be free?
Quite a few places will charge a nominal per-year fee for dns, and provide good uptime...
A lot of those are the places you register the domains from, and they make more money on registrations than dns service, but provide both.
Please provide details
You could also leave your DNS static and use EC2 Elastic IPs to shift things around on the backend (you did mention you were using EC2).
FreeDNS I've been using them for a few years. Updating the DNS info can be done in a single click for all domains. They have a few free update clients, or you can use their API to write your own client.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
PowerDNS -> run it yourself with the convenience of doing mass updates in SQL statements instead of maintaining a few dozen zone files on disk. If you think 50 domains is hard, try running several thousand on a shared hosting cluster. You either need scripted automation, or some type of DB-managed solution like PowerDNS. It's by no means the only one like it, but in my experience has worked reasonably well.
I wrote:
-davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Actually I have had two accounts 'vanished' by DynDNS now and would never use them again, including one that has been with them for about 8 years first using their dyndns service and more lately (over the last few years) using their staticdns service. Both appear to have been clobbered by their 'stuff must get updated at least every 30 days' policy [1]. Which of course makes utterly no sense for a staticdns service. The staticdns account was for a domain with a PR of about 5 (it was on the air and highly linked-to for over seven years...), so I was understandably upset to see it suddenly vanish off the air one day with no warning whatsoever.
Totally unimpressed, I would never, ever touch them for things I cared about again.
[1] Read the first couple of sentences of the second paragraph on this page:
https://www.dyndns.com/account/resetpass/index.html
Try Zerigo:NS (http://ns.zerigo.com/). The template feature may be enough to meet your needs. Change one template and every domain dependent on it changes at once.
If the templates aren't enough, there's also a REST API (brand new, not yet announced on the site, but should be functional).
Shoot me an email after setting up an account and I'll comp you at least 6mo of whatever level account you need to fit your domains. Be sure to let me know what level account you need.
To the rest of /. -- I'll comp any of you too: just mention this thread and let me know what account level.
(Disclaimer: If it wasn't obvious, I am affiliated with Zerigo.)
geek friendly VPS's and free API enabled DNS : zerigo.com
to heck with zone files, set up something like PowerDNS and set it up with a database backup. Do one update query and push out to the slaves. PDNS is also quite snappy, and configuration is far less arcane compared to Bind - in five minutes I had an authoritative, non-recursing DNS server which was not vulnerable to the Kaminsky vulnerability (even if it did recurse). It does things same, logs sanely, and doesn't make me feel like a clueless newbie like Bind does (even after ten years of adminning DNS servers).
Check it out, it's worth it.