Let me tell you a real story. I had a blog, which had no additional DNS service and was using just the name servers of the domain registrar, and I was using a regular shared hosting. You can imagine that neither the domain resolution speed nor the web hosting was great. I am experiencing the bad consequences of people clicking and not waiting for my site to load, leaving it faster than expected and not satisfying positioning on the search engines’ rankings.
The blog was loading in 20-30 milliseconds from the continent (Europe), where the servers were, but around 200-300 milliseconds on all of the rest (North America, South America, Australia, Asia, etc.).
I was losing many visitors until I started to use a Managed DNS!
The Managed DNS first brought speed, but many more features too, that improved the visitors’ experience greatly. Here you can have my observations:
Boosted speed.
Yes, you can imagine that a paid Managed DNS service will bring significant improvement when it comes to domain resolution. First, get a plan with name servers located as close as possible to your biggest audiences. Like that, you will shorter the route of the DNS queries and speed the process up. With a good provider, your domain could be resolved in less than 10 milliseconds!
Load balancing for better performance.
Not only that the speed will be better, but also you can enjoy the advantages of the load balancing that many Managed DNS services offer. The queries can be managed between the name servers and provide better performance and, most importantly, redundancy. Even if some of the servers are down, the visitors’ queries can still be answered from another of the working DNS servers. So, thanks to the load balancing, you won’t miss visits, leads, and conversions, just because your domain was offline.
No overspending.
Yes, you can rent several dedicated servers or virtual private servers and use software like Bind 9, to manage your domain on your own. But this could be hundreds of times more expensive than what a Managed DNS plan can offer. And you don’t need to think about software support because it is a SaaS (software-as-a-service). All the support, hardware and software, are the responsibility of the DNS provider.
Scalability.
Related to the previous point, you can also benefit from cloud DNS providers’ scalability. You want more resources, then you just pay and start using them in a matter of minutes. No need to set up whole OSes and software. Click a few times, perform a zone transfer, and you have another Secondary server up and running.
Top-notch security.
If you haven’t managed a server on your own, you might not know how much pain in your rear end is to secure a server if you use a DNS provider, all that responsibility and weight fall on it. You will get all the benefits of a good firewall, smart monitor of traffic, DDoS protection, and automatic triggers. I can’t really express myself how much time and effort not having to worry about security helps your business.
Conclusion
Having a Managed DNS took that blog to the next level. It was a significant and visible improvement. Sure it costs, and maybe it is an expense that you don’t want to add in the beginning. But when your site starts growing, it is a must-have DNS that will boost your overall performance.