[jread]

I recently did some DNS performance analysis and wrote a blog post about managed DNS services (along with a free report):

http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2012/08/comparison-and-analysis...

Route53 is a good choice for DNS compared to GoDaddy. It has better DDOS mitigation including custom DNS hostnames across different TLDs for each zone, and zone segmenting across their network.

[jcampbell1]

Very nice article. I recently switched to amazon from dyn. One thing I noticed is that amazon has unique hostnames for the nameservers.

Can you comment on how Amazon's use of unique name server names impacted your results? I have a suspicion that amazon is half as fast because it requires two lookups instead of 1. ns1.dyn.org is likely to be cached, but llkadjsf.amazondns.net is unlikely to be cached.

[jread]

It won't generally affect the real user test results because of a warmup/training phase in the test when those DNS records would be cached within the recursive chain.

[driverdan]

Thanks for posting this. I thought the high end providers had much better response times than this. I was under the impression that in the US they were under 50ms for direct queries. I find it interesting you say that up to 200ms is good.

[jread]

For direct synthetic tests we do see about 50ms response times in the US. For real user (recursive) tests we see lookups in the low 100ms range.