Recently Endurance International Group had a major outage, taking down many websites hosted and managed by providers such as Bluehost, Hostgator and JustHost. Our site was one of those, but of even more concern was that they were also providing our DNS (Domain Name System: mapping human readable url’s such as www.clarusft.com to IP addresses of servers). The consequence was that much more than simply the website was taken down, everything associated with our url was taken out, including email services and our hosted applications, even though these services were hosted elsewhere and unaffected in anyway.
This focused our attention on identifying a more robust DNS provider. There are quite few providers, see for example this list. After an initial review Amazon’s Route 53 certainly looked like a reasonable choice. However, I did wonder what other companies have done, especially those who had suffered with DNS outages. I found who.is/dns to be useful to investigate.
Asana
First, I had a look at Asana, co-founded by Dustin Moskovitz (of Facebook fame). Asana had been using godaddy for DNS, and were affected by the godaddy outage in 2012. A quick look at their nameservers on who.is suggest they are using Amazon.
CloudBees
After Asana I considered CloudBees, they were taken out when Zerigo failed in 2012. Similar to Asana, a quick look at their nameservers suggest they are also now using Amazon.
We have now switched to Amazon’s Route 53.