Who is Outsourcing their DNS services?

Hi everybody,

My question is sort of a two parter. I want to see what most people are using for their DNS services, in terms of both in-house/outsourcing, and also physical hardware requirements and bandwidth.

I've noticed a couple of new outsourcing DNS providers have come on the market recently. The one I've been looking at is Ultra DNS. I was considering them versus building in house because I'm clueless about how to optimize a DNS setup so it propagates quickly to the best available adjacent server. Ultra DNS claims rapid propagation and optimal server selection as one of their selling points.

My other concern would be to reduce the bandwidth load on our own network, which will have alot of multimedia content so will getting hit pretty hard. Wouldn't outsourcing queries to a third party somewhat reduce the load on our network?

Though we will be building a small, simple site with only a handful of machines, so it does kinda make sense to just do it ourselves.

I have used and configured DNS servers internally, so we could always use pretty low end machines. (For example, P133 with 64MB memory and 1 GB storage). But I have never used them publicly.

So, what kind of hardware are most people using for their public/Internet DNS machines? (processor, disk space, memory) Also, what kind of load does it put on your bandwidth?

My main concerns are providing adequate disk space for the DNS database, along with making sure we have adequate bandwidth for queries. I would figure that the amount of information being passed from one DNS server to another would be so small that the bandwidth would be minimal. Is that a fair assumption?

Sorry if this is a question that has been asked before, I've searched all over the place, but have not found much information in this area.

p.s. Who is a masochist and tried to implement Microsoft Active Directory as their DNS manager?

https://www.ultradns.com/

>> what kind of hardware are most people using for their public/Internet DNS machines?

If you don't use BIND, your existing low-end machines could do just fine. Of course, adding a little more RAMs would be even better.

>> the amount of information being passed from one DNS server to another

DNS servers don't speak to each others. Like I always said, BIND combined authoritative DNS server and caching DNS resolver into one package, which often confuses people and believe caching DNS resolver is a DNS server, in DNS terminology it's not.

>> I've searched all over the place

You should start here -> http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html
djb makes the best and most secure, reliable, and low resource consumption software on earth.

>> providing adequate disk space for the DNS database

Check tinydns (one of the packages of djbdns). Storing zone records in cdb format is roughly 7000 times faster than BIND's ugly format.

>> tried to implement Microsoft Active Directory

Just don't run any servers on M$.

Wow thanks freebsd, you have cleared up some misconceptions I had regarding DNS and BIND.

I will check out djb, they sound like the real deal.

You are the man!