Great Features & Integration Options | Comes at a Price
August 29, 2018
Great Features & Integration Options | Comes at a Price
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Dyn Managed DNS
As a small business website provider in a couple of very specific niches, we needed an HA solution to keep our sites available to consumers as close to 100% as possible. Rather than a single, high traffic domain name, we serve up thousands of independent business domains using the same underlying platform. The managed DNS solution from Dyn allows us to make sure our client sites are highly available.
- API availability. Given that we deal with thousands of domains with different DNS record requirements, automated provisioning and updates are a must-have. Presence of working SDKs allow for quick integration and automation.
- Traffic Controller. Ability to load balance and automatically failover to backup data centers seamlessly and automatically ensures a highly available web experience for our client sites.
- Scalability. Traffic to client sites increases exponentially during holiday periods. The DNS infrastructure handles traffic spikes without issue.
- Pricing for every individual, tiny feature makes understanding billing quite difficult. Features that you might think would be included in a per-domain cost, are not. Pricing for individual traffic controller records, individual domains, http redirects, resource records, QPS, etc... contract pricing could be greatly simplified and less expensive.
- It could have been one-off scenario since it took place immediately after the Oracle purchase of Dyn, but it took 45+ days to get a credit from the billing department after signing an increased contract addendum when working on overage resolutions. This was unacceptable.
- While handling traffic for large brand websites can be considered a positive for the business, the large number of sites that Dyn services also makes it a target for DDOS and other attacks. A disruption at one of the largest
- Cost: The expectation of high availability is almost a given when building a platform that servers thousands of client websites. Given the simple failover features that our company uses I believe the product is overpriced. It works, but it is overpriced.
- Reporting: When dealing with thousands of individual domains, reporting can be difficult to get snapshots of data for individual domains or identify zones that are generating an extraordinary amount of traffic. We've been forced to contact the support team to request some reporting that is not available in the management portal.
- Simple execution of highly available website routing. (positive)
- Robust infrastructure to handle bursts of traffic and DDOS prevention. (positive)
- Available, full featured api to allow zone management automation. (positive)
- High cost for simple features (negative)
Neustar managed DNS offer similar features and scalability. Pricing was equally as high or higher.
TZO was our previous HA DNS provider and were absolutely great to work with. Purchased by Dyn, so we were assimilated into the Dyn family of products.
Open Source solutions. If internal development and infrastructure resources are available and capable, I would recommend building your own cloud-based, highly available DNS infrastructure. Aside from some advanced features that Dyn may offer such as geo load-balancing or DDOS protection and mitigation, building your own product is both educational and often times more cost effective. This option requires substantial knowledge, but offers great learning opportunities and understand of DNS systems and allows development of a solution that exactly fits your needs.
TZO was our previous HA DNS provider and were absolutely great to work with. Purchased by Dyn, so we were assimilated into the Dyn family of products.
Open Source solutions. If internal development and infrastructure resources are available and capable, I would recommend building your own cloud-based, highly available DNS infrastructure. Aside from some advanced features that Dyn may offer such as geo load-balancing or DDOS protection and mitigation, building your own product is both educational and often times more cost effective. This option requires substantial knowledge, but offers great learning opportunities and understand of DNS systems and allows development of a solution that exactly fits your needs.