It's about paid customers and not only friends. Paid customers expect a smooth service. At the moment I have multiple (virtual and physicall) servers around the world to both host and deal with nameservers. This solution is time and money consuming, so I am moving to a different approach.
A single shared nameserver does not grant a 100% uptime and costs 2x the price of the business plan that company I linked earlier is offering. I call this an expensive and badly implemented solution.
A single self-hosted nameserver does not grant a 100% uptime and requires a fitting internet connection and an old box to run bind on. At the moment I do not have an old box or server to run bind on, and even if I had it, the box could die and I would have to deal with the downtime (single nameserver), buy spare parts, lost time to fix the box and at the moment I do not have a fitting internet connection.
Godaddy's dns hosting is utter crap, it seriously hurts my eyes and needs a bazilion clicks to accomplish a simple task so I am looking for valid alternatives providing more than one nameserver, with uptimes close to (better yet: matching) 100%, to save money and time and keep paid and free customers happy.
Since when was running named on a pair of servers (put one on linode and one on slicehost for redundancy) not work for all but the larger companies? And by the time you are that large, cost of name servers is so insignificant as to be round off error.
I always used to think that I was missing something special about DNS - I mean, it can't be as simple as configuring named.conf for a master and slave, creating a zone file, tossing an SOA plus some Resource Records into it, could it? Perhaps it's because I keep a 500 page copy of "DNS and BIND" on my desk, and perhaps it's because large deployments of DNS _are_ complex - but for the vast majority (and certainly anybody simple enough to outsource there DNS to a hosting organization) - it's a pretty straightforward, solved and inexpensive problem.
The one reason to do this, I guess, is if you just are done with the "part-time-systems-administrator" gig, and would just like to wash your hands of it. But, if you have to do some of it already, the incremental cost of running for multiple organizations is pretty insignificant.
I realize, btw, that this is off topic - and you are actually looking for guidance on out-sourced DNS servers - I just couldn't restrain my fingers when I caught your paragraphs noting the cost of parts and servers. $40/month buys you two servers, one with slicehost and one with linode.
There are a lot of reasons to hand your DNS to a third party (Nice interfaces, handling the customer service, hassle-of-managing) - but cost of servers/internet isn't one of them.
old box at your house on a static ip, old box at your friends house who uses a different provider.
Cost $0 if you have some old stuff lying around + the power they use.
Cheaper and just as good. The chance of both providers going down at the same time is pretty slim.
Heck, I'll host your secondary if you want it for free, it's not like I'll notice the bandwidth. Primary is different because you'll need access, secondary is just a bunch of lines in a conf file, it'll update when your primary does.
mail me at [email protected] if you want to take me up on that offer.
Another way of looking at this is that you need many more customers. The overhead of doing all this for a handful of customers is significant, it only starts to pay off at certain economies of scale.
I'm just a webdeveloper hosting some of the people/companies website I work for. Since from time to time I have to get my hands dirty with their projects again, I prefer to do so in an environment I know because I set it up personally. If I had to let them decide, most of them would go for crappy inexpensive hosting providers and additionally I would have to deal with a lot of passwords when I get to deal with their stuff again.
The money I live with comes from me coding stuff, not from the hosting. Since I am trying to get a personal project up and running I am trying to cut all the expenses (time/money) I can possibily cut or reduce; that's all.
Hosting DNS costs next to nothing, it is hardly any bandwidth, and any old server will do. A $9 / month shared host would do the job.
As for hosted DNS, almost every big registrar offers this service, it is fine as long as your requirements are simple.
Enom, godaddy, moniker, netsol they all do this, with some of them it is free if they are the party used to register the domain.