Use Amazon Route 53 over the registrar’s DNS servers

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I am building a site that I anticipate will have high usage. Currently, my registrar (GoDaddy) is handling DNS. However, Amazon's Route 53 looks interesting. They promise high speed and offer globally distributed DNS servers and a programmable interface. While GoDaddy doesn't offer a programmable interface, I assume their servers are geographically distributed as well.

What are the main reasons I should opt to use Amazon Route 53 over free registrar-based DNS?

Best Answer

GoDaddy [...] I assume their servers are geographically distributed

Don't assume, verify with GoDaddy or verify it yourself. A quick traceroute to nsX.secureserver.com (a common DNS server name for GoDaddy) gives me a response from a datacenter here in Scandinavia where I live. So yes, it seems that GoDaddy has its nameservers spread out over at least the US and Europe. But check the nameservers assigned to your domain.

main reasons I should opt to use Amazon Route 53

  • Amazon has clearly documented how their server setup is. They use Anycast, and have DNS servers in 15+ locations worldwide. Their service seems well engineered for high uptime.

  • Having your DNS resolve from 15+ locations worldwide makes your website a little bit faster for your end users. It also allows you to use a lower TTL, which means in case of a website failure, you can move your service over to a new IP faster.

  • In the future, Amazon plans to integrate Route53 with their other cloud offerings. If you uses some of these, such as EC2 and Elastic Load Balancer, then you will benefit from this integration. What they'll build isn't known yet, but one-step setup of Elastic Load Balancing and health check integration with CloudWatch seem like reasonable guesses.

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