Migrating to a DNS hosting provider
I have recently migrated all the DNS data of Lokad.com toward DnsMadeEasy.com, a provider specialized with DNS hosting. For a long time, it did not even crossed my mind that such low cost independent service would actually exists.
DNS stands for Domain Name System. In simply words, the DNS converts the domain name address into a IP address.
Why do I need to know anything about DNS?
As a webmaster, DNS are most usually completely handled by your hosting provider. If your web requirements are simple, you might not even cross DNS settings, everything being completely handled by the hosting provider.
Yet, if you start to rely on 3rd party hosted services such as blog hosting and forums hosting, you may have to update your DNS settings so that the URL is blog.mycompany.com instead of mycompany.myblogprovider.com. With those 3rd party hosted service, your internet domain becomes a patchwork that includes machines owned by various hosting providers. For example, both blog.lokad.com and forums.lokad.com are hosted by 3rd party companies.
Why should I bother about DNS?
At present time, there are many dirty cheap hosted services. Lokad is still a uISV but relies already on almost a dozen of various hosted services providers. And, in very center of this small network lies the DNS. If the DNS go wrong, then the whole network is going to be in deep trouble.
Until very recently, Lokad was relying on the DNS management provided by a low cost regular hosting provider. The DNS hosting was really reliable, we never encountered any issue at that level. Yet, I was a bit concerned by the fact that the “Lokad network” was dependent on a regular hosting provider to manage all the information related to the other hosting providers. This situation was making this particular hosting provider much more critical to the whole network than it ought to be.
Thus, I have decided to migrate everything to DnsMadeEasy. As a result, I am gaining flexibility for potential further hosting migrations. One might argue that I have simply moved for critical node for my previous hosting provider to DnsMadeEasy. That’s true. But DnsMadeEasy is completely dedicated to DNS management. Thus, they are not competing with other providers that are referred by the DNS.