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Best DNS Service With API Access?

Posted by samzenpus on from the free-advice dept.

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?"

6 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. "media-based company" by perlchild · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  2. Elastic IPs? by andrewl6097 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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).

  3. What the heck? by davidu · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I commented on this story in the firehose... what happened to that? [ http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=974977&cid=25145093 ]

    I wrote:

    We're working on providing a FULL API to EveryDNS. Slowly, but surely. I've got new folks on board taking over the site to make it finally be the awesome beast it should be. And it'll still be free. I'm also trying to figure out a way to tie this into Pingdom's API since a lot of people already use that for monitoring. :-)

    -davidu

    --

    # Hack the planet, it's important.
    1. Re:What the heck? by netaustin · · Score: 3, Interesting

      davidu,

      I actually met you in college at one point; you were a senior, I was a [self involved] freshman, and you gave me some very good advice then too. FWIW.

      Thanks to everyone for all the great advice. I'm going to probably roll with EveryDNS one way or the other out of loyalty to their service which has never let me down.

      And we'll donate our savings from DNSPark.

      We use and love OpenDNS too. If you're ever in New York, I owe you a beer.

      -netaustin

  4. Re:DynDNS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  5. Re:Run a master? by Sentry21 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.