Choosing a DNS Provider

If your DNS is down, you're down. It doesn't matter that your servers are humming, your code is perfect, your database is healthy. Users type your domain and nothing happens. They don't see an error page. They see nothing—their browser can't even find you.

This is why DNS provider selection matters more than most infrastructure decisions. You're choosing the foundation everything else sits on.

The Three Types of DNS Providers

Registrar DNS comes free with your domain. It works. For a personal blog or side project, it's fine. But "fine" has limits: basic features, no performance optimization, support that's an afterthought. When you outgrow it, you'll know.

Dedicated DNS providers do one thing and do it well. They've invested in global server networks, redundant infrastructure, and sophisticated routing. They charge for this—usually per million queries or per domain—but the reliability and performance justify the cost for anything that matters.

Cloud provider DNS makes sense when you're already deep in that ecosystem. AWS Route 53 integrates beautifully with AWS services. Google Cloud DNS with Google Cloud. The integration simplifies your infrastructure, though it tightens the vendor lock-in.

What Actually Matters

Speed

Every web request starts with DNS. Before your server can send a single byte, the user's device has to resolve your domain name to an IP address. Slow DNS means slow everything.

The key is geographic distribution. A DNS provider with servers in Frankfurt answers queries from Berlin faster than one routing through Virginia. For global audiences, you want servers everywhere. For regional businesses, you want density in your markets.

Anycast routing—where multiple servers share the same IP address and traffic flows to the nearest one—is standard among serious providers. If a provider doesn't use anycast, keep looking.

Reliability

Uptime guarantees sound reassuring until you read the fine print. A "100% uptime SLA" might credit you a few dollars for hours of downtime while your business loses thousands. The SLA exists to make you feel safe, not to make you whole.

What actually protects you:

• Geographic redundancy: Servers spread across continents, so a regional outage doesn't take you offline
• Network redundancy: Multiple upstream providers, so a backbone failure doesn't disconnect them
• DDoS protection: The capacity to absorb attack traffic without buckling

Look at the provider's track record. Check their status page history. Incidents happen to everyone—what matters is how they handle them and how quickly they recover.

Features Worth Caring About

Health checking and failover monitors your servers and automatically stops sending traffic to dead ones. Without this, a crashed server means manual DNS updates and extended downtime. With it, traffic reroutes in minutes.

GeoDNS sends different users to different servers based on location. European visitors hit your European servers. Asian visitors hit Asian ones. Latency drops. User experience improves.

API access lets you manage DNS through code instead of clicking through web interfaces. Essential for automation, dynamic infrastructure, and anyone who deploys more than occasionally.

DNSSEC cryptographically signs your DNS records, preventing attackers from hijacking your traffic through spoofed responses. Adoption has been slow, but for sensitive services—anything involving money, health data, or authentication—it's worth enabling.

Features That Probably Don't Matter Yet

Traffic weighting for A/B tests. City-level GeoDNS precision. Custom routing rules based on ASN. These exist. They're powerful. You almost certainly don't need them until you do, and you'll know when that day comes.

Don't pay for complexity you won't use.

Pricing Reality

Query-based pricing (per million queries) scales with usage. Good for predictable traffic, potentially surprising during viral moments or attacks.

Zone-based pricing (per domain) works well for high-traffic sites, expensive if you host dozens of low-traffic domains.

Free tiers exist and work for testing and personal projects. They lack the performance, features, and support that production services need.

The actual cost for most businesses is modest—often less than a good lunch per month. Don't over-optimize here. The downside of choosing wrong (unreliability, poor performance) far exceeds the savings from choosing cheap.

Making the Decision

For side projects: Use your registrar's DNS. It's free and sufficient.

For businesses: Pick a dedicated provider with good uptime history, health checking, and responsive support. Cloudflare, AWS Route 53, Google Cloud DNS, NS1, Dyn—all are solid choices with different strengths.

For cloud-native applications: Seriously consider your cloud provider's DNS. The integration benefits usually outweigh minor feature differences.

For large-scale operations: You need enterprise features, dedicated support, and a provider that can handle billions of queries. This is a conversation with sales teams, not a self-service signup.

The best DNS provider is the one you never think about—the one that quietly resolves billions of queries while you focus on building what matters. Choose reliability over features. Choose proven over novel. Choose boring infrastructure that works.