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Dyn Managed DNS - A Solid Choice
April 02, 2019

Dyn Managed DNS - A Solid Choice

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Dyn Managed DNS

Dyn is one of our external DNS providers, serving DNS queries for our properties to the general internet population.
  • Reliable
  • "Advanced" DNS Services Available (Load Balanced DNS, Monitoring and Automatic Failover, GeoDNS, etc)
  • An API for advanced users and bulk changes
  • Reasonably priced
  • As a relatively experienced engineer, I find the UI to be incredibly obtuse and counter-intuitive. I try and use the API for most things, but for some people that may not be an option.
  • The user documentation is a bit hard to navigate. DNS in general is pretty simple, so this is a minor gripe, but it's hard to find specific info sometimes.
  • Dyn supporting our external DNS needs eliminates our need to provide our own external DNS platform, recovering time and money that might have otherwise been spent on hardware and engineering.
  • No DNS = no visitors = no revenue, so Dyn's stability greatly contributes to our success as an online marketplace.
We actually use both providers, but Dyn is our primary.

In terms of feature set, both companies have very similar offerings. We've found Verisign's UI and documentation to be overall more usable, but Dyn's GeoDNS management is far simpler. Both companies offer an API, and while Verisign's documentation was a little better, we were able to accomplish more with Dyn's.

Overall, the two providers have near-parity in features, so our decision came largely down to cost and timing.
We've had relatively little need to engage with Dyn support (a testament to the stability of the platform, for sure), but when we have we've found them knowledgeable and helpful; no real concerns there.
This is the only real gripe we have with Dyn; their web-UI can be remarkably painful to use.

In the "simple" editor, DNS records are arranged in a kind of "node" view, where each record is a node and any records of the same name or longer (i.e. all records called "record.example.com" or "other.record.example.com") fall under it. This creates an odd sort of hierarchical view that's not really representative of the zone file.

The "expert" editor doesn't have an actual delete button, just a checkbox. If you want to update conflicting record types (for example, replacing an A record with a CNAME) you have to check the box for the record being deleted, save changes, create the new record, save changes, and finally publish changes.

Dyn uses a publish model for changes, where all changes you make are staged and can be reverted or published all at once. This is fine, except that the publish/revert dialog is in a different page. This is nice when you have many changes, but very annoying when you're changing just one or two records across multiple zones.

These are relatively minor issues in an otherwise good platform; annoyances more than deal breakers.
Dyn is something of an industry standard when it comes to global DNS providers. The platform is used by many major web-based companies, and for good reason.

As one of the largest providers of public DNS services, Dyn is hard to beat in terms of reliability or feature set. However, if your QPS needs aren't at an enterprise level and you won't be taking advantage of some of the more "advanced" features like DNS Load Balancing, Traffic Director, or GeoDNS, you may be better off with a less-expensive plan or alternative.