Have you ever used a dynamic DNS setup? If your hosting service/DNS provider allows, this could be a good way to avoid having to manually edit your zone when your machine’s IP changes. Any thoughts on this?

Thanks for the great article. I used to have the DNS for all my domains set up this way but I got complacent recently and just left the name servers at whichever cheapo shared hosting provider I signed up for. That’s all fixed now.

If you happened to be thinking about writing another article on DNS about why you might want to (or not want to) use a DNS provider such as DynDNS instead of just using your domain registrar’s DNS services, then that article would certainly be much appreciated. I for one don’t understand the benefits of a paid DNS provider, or, really, what they provide that my domain registrar doesn’t.

Regards,
John

The important point of this post is to avoid changing your nameservers. Changing your IP is fine, and relatively quick and painless. Changing nameservers sucks.

Perhaps this is simply the trade-off we need to make in order to have full control over our DNS zone records, but I’m cautious because what I describe has happened to me before (even though I paid extra for a static IP on my shared host).

If you’ve got a solution to this problem or know of a host that offers one, I’d love to hear about it. Thanks again!

We recently purchased a yearly credit over at Zoneedit, and we’ve been happy there. I also have accounts over at Everydns.

Recently Amazon started offering Route53, which looks very interesting as well.

DynDNS has their Dynect (ultra) DNS platform for the enterprise.

I’d really love to see a feature by feature comparison across the board and see how well the different companies stack up to each other, to really see who has the most effective, lowest-latency, resilient network available.