DNS provider comparison

In general, there are many providers where you can get DNS hosting services for free. This, however, is not always the best choice as you only get a basic service.

When we were searching for a suitable DNS provider with the best price-performance ratio for our domain labs64.com, we took our time. As we were looking for a more sophisticated service, we limited our search down to the following providers.

DynDNS

On their website, DynDNS claims that ‘Uptime is the bottom line‘. While this is very true, especially for IT service providers like us, we would like to try first and buy later. DynDNS does offer a free 14 day trial period yet the trial policy is not particularly customer-friendly. We had to enter out credit card information and the trial period continues automatically as a paid service unless you cancel it on time.

FreeDNS.afraid.org

As the name already suggests you can get DNS services for free. If you sign up for the free version, you will have to accept the fact that it requires domain sharing. For us, domain sharing was out of the question so we had to go for the paid alternative. Although the paid service is ok, the pricing was rather expensive compared to other providers. Prices start as $30 per year for one private domain or $5 per month for three invisible domains.

ClouDNS

The user interface is very easy to use even though there is no help provided for the entry formats. You can add three domains to a free account yet TTL management and cloud / bulk domains are only available with a premium account. For an extra $2 per month you can also get API access. Unfortunately, it is not possible to set up automatic recurring payments.

XName

This service is conditionally free yet a financial contribution is mandatory for small companies. Moreover, all pending zones may be deleted without prior notice. Sounds like an ill-defined policy? That‘s exactly what we thought.

zoneedit

Another DNS service provide we really like. Prices start at 1 credit per month for one zone (one domain). If you buy multiple credits, the price will go down from $1, discounts up to more than 50% are possible. However, there is no automatic recurring payment possible for the DNS service, making it unreliable for us.

appnor

We don‘t have an opinion about appnor as we only received a 500 server error when we tried to access.

eurodns

Unfortunately, we couldn‘t find out whether eurodns only provides free DNS for domains registered with them.

Conclusion

In the end we signed up with ClouDNS so obviously we think it is the best service. There are some pros and cons to be considered and in the end it was a close call with zoneedit so we‘re looking forward to hearing your view on this topic.