Free DNS
If you've got a tiny personal website for something like holiday photos to share with friends and family, and you don't expect it to grow and don't care about uptime, free hosting is the right choice for you. There's no shortage of free DNS hosting providers to choose from, and each has a variety of different features.
Some come equipped with firewall policies, filtering, and rate limiting and blocking to help prevent DDoS attacks. The majority of free services include facilities to manage the records of your domain zone and typically offer Dynamic DNS.
If yours is a casual site or simply something you are doing for fun and it's not the end of the world if the site is down for a couple of days, free DNS services should work for you. On the other hand, if it's a commercial site that is driving your whole business, then you should choose a service that will safeguard your site with better support and uptime. These are the key differences between opting for free DNS and going for a premium service.
Premium DNS
Every commercial website should use premium DNS to guarantee they are both safe and available to their customers. There are distinct advantages of paying for a DNS: improved site availability, faster performance, and minimal security gaps.
Premium DNS involves pointing your domain to premium nameservers and setting up your records on these nameservers.
These are the typical features you should expect from premium DNS services:
- Many premium DNS service providers offer Dynamic DNS (DDNS). DDNS automatically maps internet domain names to IP addresses, allowing you to access your home computer from anywhere in the world. Unlike standard DNS, which only works with static DNS, DDNS is designed to work with changing IP addresses, which is a good fit for home networks.
- Secondary DNS - This premium feature is particularly useful if you manage your nameservers and want a backup or redundancy. A secondary nameserver will ensure that your domain never goes offline.
- Management interface - A well-configured DNS dashboard lets you manage and make updates to your DNS easily online, instead of going through customer services to redirect your DNS using different record types, for example.
- Reporting - Advanced reporting is available with premium services, including analytics that report the source country and record type for queried hostnames.
- Administrative Control - Admin controls let you delegate administrator privileges with ease.
- Two-way authentication - Protect your domain with two-factor login authentication.
- DNS templates - Save time by applying DNS templates to the domain names in your Premium DNS Dashboard. This is useful if you are managing multiple websites.
- Fast Performance - Redundancy - Guaranteed service level agreement for DNS resolution between 99-100% with paid DNS plans.
- Queries per month - Premium DNS services guarantee domain resolution on millions of queries per month.
- Close security gaps - Hackers can use your IP address to point to a malicious IP address to trick users into divulging important information and sometimes even money. Premium DNS hosting provides an additional layer of security for your website and thus additional protection from hackers.
- DNSSEC support - Increase your domain name security with managed DNSSEC. Premium nameservers provide support and security for top level domains to protect them from attacks. Hackers have been known to infiltrate the DNS lookup process, directing users to deceptive sites for password and account collection, for example. DNSSEC is employed to protect domains from any vulnerabilities in the DNS system.
- First-class customer service. DNS can get a bit tricky, so having professional support as and when you need it is invaluable to a smooth running website.
- It is easy to use. Experts and beginners will find the interface for managing their nameservers simple to navigate.
Paid DNS services offer advanced features to manage your DNS, combined with a higher level of support and faster loading times. If you want super fast IP address resolution, you need a premium nameserver.
The fact of the matter is, extremely quick websites leave a good impression. People are impatient online. If you can shave a few milliseconds off the time it takes for people to discover your site via DNS, you might see some marginal gains.
Fast speeds aren't only to impress your site visitors; you'll want to impress Google with your site's loading and availability. If your site loading times aren't up to scratch, your search engine rankings and subsequent click rates could take a hit (DNS capabilities make up a huge part of site load times).
what is dns
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