[ksec]

From my experience EdgeCast and DNSMadeEasy were consistently the fastest DNS. I guess both were dropped because of price when Google DNS and Route53 did the a similar job.

And as other have said, while Cloudflare may not be for everyone, their DNS is possibly the fastest. Not sure why SO decide to drop them.

*Some old Data http://www.dnsperf.com/

I also wonder on the performance of DNSimple. But they dont see to emphasis much on performance.

[thefarseeker]

So DNSMadeEasy made it all the way through the barrage of tests. I even wrote a library for their API so that we could integrate it into our DNS software (https://github.com/mhenderson-so/godnsmadeeasy), but at the end of the day their performance in certain regions was not good enough. In some countries they were measurably faster than R53, but in others they were measurably much slower.

EdgeCast were dropped due to pricing, and that there's talk of Verizon selling the EdgeCast services again.

DNSimple didn't make it to performance testing because they only had 5 POPs, as opposed to 20+ of other providers.

CloudFlare's DNS was consistently one of the fastest, you are correct about that. If you read my responses to other comments here, you'll find that we decided not use their DNS service because of some fairly pervasive API issues we had with it.