25 ms·

GoDaddy Outage: How to Migrate to AWS Route 53

115 points by davewasmer 14y ago

tux1968 14y ago
Does AWS not offer registrar services? Seems a bit inconvenient to find a separate registrar.
- tedchs 14y ago
  I use AWS for most things (including Route53, which is awesome), but I actually like not having my eggs in one basket. If something crazy happens with my AWS account, I could always theoretically point my DNS resolution somewhere else. The domain registrar is reduced to an annual auto-bill transaction on my credit card and they don't have any particular technical responsibility for my traffic.
  - davewasmer 14y ago
    This is a good point - for web based companies, your domain registrar will always be your single point of failure. So it makes sense to keep it separate, with the most trustworthy company you can find. Even in nasty scenario (like GoDaddy's DNS service going down), you can still point your domain somewhere else, even temporarily. But the worst case, your domain registrar going down, leaves you with no alternatives.
    - saurik 14y ago
      > But the worst case, you domain registrar going down, leaves you with no alternatives. Your domain registrar does not do anything except mediate your ability to alter your DNS records and allow you to renew your domain name entries: it really shouldn't matter if they go offline unless they go offline for months at a time. You thereby should never, under any circumstance where your domain's availability means anything to you at all, allow your domain name registrar to handle all of your DNS records (as many of the people in that "GoDaddy's DNS Service is Down" thread have done). Instead, at least some of your authoritative DNS servers should be hosted by anyone other than your registrar: otherwise, you can end up in the situation where all of your DNS goes offline and you can't update your DNS records. (Of course, you should really not have all of your DNS records hosted by a single company that doesn't have any internal redundancy in the first place; this criteria alone should exclude companies that don't really care about DNS, like any registrar ever, from being your only DNS provider.) (Note: I'm not certain if today's outage of GoDaddy's DNS infrastructure affected anyone's ability to use their portal to update their DNS records, but one could easily imagine simple scenarios where that happens.)
  - wethesheeple 14y ago
    This really seems to make the most sense. It's just a name. An entry in a registry's zone file. It has nothing necessarily to do with your infrastructure (which does not need names to function; even email can work without domain names). A name is just a name. It provides no "availability" of network resources. But how many customers understand this? The problem that flows from this lack of understanding is registrars (people who sell names, entries in some registrar's zone file) push hard for the "upsell" and succeed get customers to sign up for all these other services that are quite different from registrar services. They are qualitatively different services and require significantly more resources than just selling (renting, actually) names.
- sharth 14y ago
  They do not offer that service.
Nyr 14y ago
Free and reliable alternative from another big ISP: https://dns.he.net/ https://dns.he.net/
- driverdan 14y ago
  Another free alternative is CloudFlare: https://www.cloudflare.com/ https://www.cloudflare.com/
  - marcamillion 14y ago
    Do you know if I can host multiple domains on my free account at CloudFlare? i.e. if I open an account for mysexyblog.com, but I also want to host: mysexyecommercestore.com and myunsexywebsite.com (both of which are not related to mysexyblog.com) can I do it with no problems?
- jakeludington 14y ago
  Since when does trusting a business critical function to a free service make any sense? At least GoDaddy has a motivation to provide some level of service because people are paying them. Some other alternatives that aren't free, but are highly reliable are: http://dyn.com/ http://dyn.com/ http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com I use the latter one and in addition to providing an alternative to my registrar, they also seem to have much faster response times, which cut some milliseconds off a site lookup.
  - Nyr 14y ago
    My suggestion makes sense since they are a very big ISP and they simply don't care about the cost of a service that they would need to provide to their clients anyway. Namecheap does the same and most people think that they provide a good service. Seriously, pay if you want, but if you aren't Google, you don't need to pay for reliable DNS hosting.
jread 14y ago
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-of-managed-dns.html 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.
- driverdan 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
- jcampbell1 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
recampbell 14y ago
We recently wrote a tool which can populate our DNS entries in either Route 53 or another provider (can't recall which). So if one goes down, we can run a script which brings up our DNS entires in the alternate provider. I guess someone could service-fy this and have a meta-DNS service which let you switch backend providers. Make it so.
- tux1968 14y ago
  You could leave them both live with your name server entries pointing at both as well. Then there is nothing to do if only one of them goes down. Waiting until one goes down will mean that requests aren't being served to anyone getting a cached DNS entry with references to the previous hosts.
franklaemmer 14y ago
After a similar DDoS attack on the german provider InternetX we simply set up our own backup name servers. One can do this on a VPS.
rb2k_ 14y ago
Another nice options is Cloudflare. Especially for small personal blogs, they are free and even offer to put a CDN in front of your data.
vegardx 14y ago
Another option is the Linode DNS Manager. They also have a pretty decent (as far as I can tell, never used it, have my own solution) API for managing them. Or you can just do it via the website. As far as I can tell it's free of charge, as you only need to be a member, but since I host two of my external DNS servers there I cannot actually check that you don't have to be a customer. Maybe a fellow HN user can verify? On another note, hosting DNS is really easy once you get the grip on how things work.
- d503 14y ago
  When I stopped my Linodes I'm pretty sure I remember they warned that my DNS would be stopped along with them, so I do think you have to be a paying customer for that to work.
BryanB55 14y ago
I'd also recommend taking a look at cloudflare, their DNS service is supposed to be pretty fast, I haven't done any measuring myself but here's a recent post they wrote: http://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-aka-kickassdns http://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-aka-kickassdns So far I've been very happy with their service and it's nice to not only get good DNS hosting but also some security and CDN support. I switched everything away from Godaddy along time ago. In the past, oh I dont know, maybe year or so, it seems like Godaddy has received so much negative publicity. First with the elephant killing, then with supporting SOPA and now this.
- MikeKusold 14y ago
  I just switched to them yesterday. They have a very nice import tool that matches up all your CNAMES and other records.
zhoutong 14y ago
You can get a Anycast zone (basically it's Route 53) for free with a domain on NameTerrific. Also the registration is handled by eNom, so you can switch your domain registrar at the same time. https://www.nameterrific.com/ https://www.nameterrific.com/ Disclosure: I'm the founder of NameTerrific.
azarias 14y ago
Just moved ours to Route 53 in the afternoon. I had been on the fence lately, especially after doing a few of the tests on http://cloudharmony.com/dnstest http://cloudharmony.com/dnstest, but the move so far has been simple, and new relic reports nearly similar results for us.
jaytaylor 14y ago
Another option that I've heard good things about is called PowerDNS. It's full-blown DNS server which includes a RESTful API. http://www.powerdns.com/ http://www.powerdns.com/ https://github.com/Habbie/powerdns https://github.com/Habbie/powerdns
mbell 14y ago
Side note: If your moving and need to figure out a way to redirect a naked domain without having to run a server, and also happen to be using Google Apps then Google Apps will actually do this for you. Its in the Domain settings in the admin panel.
mpclark 14y ago
It might be worth mentioning for those that aren't totally confident with DNS that (a) errors in setting up your DNS can take your services off line in unexpected ways (anyone else ever forgotten to put in an MX record and only realised three days later they weren't getting any email?) so be careful, and (b) at the low end one advantage of letting your host manage your DNS is that they can make changes behind the scenes -- for example, changing the IP of your website or moving your account to a different physical machine -- and they'll just update your DNS and everything keeps working. If your site is hosted somewhere like DreamHost but you put your DNS somewhere else, one morning you will wake up and find your site is no longer accessible and you'll have to remember that this is probably why.
- Dylan16807 14y ago
  The RFC says that if there isn't an explicit MX record then it implicitly falls back onto the A record. But I'm sure many implementations screw it up.
rdl 14y ago
I really wish Route53 did secondary DNS using normal bind zone-transfer protocol.
marcamillion 14y ago
If GoDaddy is my domain registrar, but I host my domain on CloudFlare and GoDaddy goes down, will my domain go down?

115 points by davewasmer 14y ago

tux1968 14y ago

Does AWS not offer registrar services? Seems a bit inconvenient to find a separate registrar.

tedchs 14y ago
I use AWS for most things (including Route53, which is awesome), but I actually like not having my eggs in one basket. If something crazy happens with my AWS account, I could always theoretically point my DNS resolution somewhere else. The domain registrar is reduced to an annual auto-bill transaction on my credit card and they don't have any particular technical responsibility for my traffic.
- davewasmer 14y ago
  This is a good point - for web based companies, your domain registrar will always be your single point of failure. So it makes sense to keep it separate, with the most trustworthy company you can find. Even in nasty scenario (like GoDaddy's DNS service going down), you can still point your domain somewhere else, even temporarily. But the worst case, your domain registrar going down, leaves you with no alternatives.
  - saurik 14y ago
    > But the worst case, you domain registrar going down, leaves you with no alternatives. Your domain registrar does not do anything except mediate your ability to alter your DNS records and allow you to renew your domain name entries: it really shouldn't matter if they go offline unless they go offline for months at a time. You thereby should never, under any circumstance where your domain's availability means anything to you at all, allow your domain name registrar to handle all of your DNS records (as many of the people in that "GoDaddy's DNS Service is Down" thread have done). Instead, at least some of your authoritative DNS servers should be hosted by anyone other than your registrar: otherwise, you can end up in the situation where all of your DNS goes offline and you can't update your DNS records. (Of course, you should really not have all of your DNS records hosted by a single company that doesn't have any internal redundancy in the first place; this criteria alone should exclude companies that don't really care about DNS, like any registrar ever, from being your only DNS provider.) (Note: I'm not certain if today's outage of GoDaddy's DNS infrastructure affected anyone's ability to use their portal to update their DNS records, but one could easily imagine simple scenarios where that happens.)
- wethesheeple 14y ago
  This really seems to make the most sense. It's just a name. An entry in a registry's zone file. It has nothing necessarily to do with your infrastructure (which does not need names to function; even email can work without domain names). A name is just a name. It provides no "availability" of network resources. But how many customers understand this? The problem that flows from this lack of understanding is registrars (people who sell names, entries in some registrar's zone file) push hard for the "upsell" and succeed get customers to sign up for all these other services that are quite different from registrar services. They are qualitatively different services and require significantly more resources than just selling (renting, actually) names.
sharth 14y ago
They do not offer that service.

Nyr 14y ago

Free and reliable alternative from another big ISP: https://dns.he.net/ https://dns.he.net/

driverdan 14y ago
Another free alternative is CloudFlare: https://www.cloudflare.com/ https://www.cloudflare.com/
- marcamillion 14y ago
  Do you know if I can host multiple domains on my free account at CloudFlare? i.e. if I open an account for mysexyblog.com, but I also want to host: mysexyecommercestore.com and myunsexywebsite.com (both of which are not related to mysexyblog.com) can I do it with no problems?
jakeludington 14y ago
Since when does trusting a business critical function to a free service make any sense? At least GoDaddy has a motivation to provide some level of service because people are paying them. Some other alternatives that aren't free, but are highly reliable are: http://dyn.com/ http://dyn.com/ http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com I use the latter one and in addition to providing an alternative to my registrar, they also seem to have much faster response times, which cut some milliseconds off a site lookup.
- Nyr 14y ago
  My suggestion makes sense since they are a very big ISP and they simply don't care about the cost of a service that they would need to provide to their clients anyway. Namecheap does the same and most people think that they provide a good service. Seriously, pay if you want, but if you aren't Google, you don't need to pay for reliable DNS hosting.

jread 14y ago

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-of-managed-dns.html 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.

driverdan 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
jcampbell1 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.

recampbell 14y ago

We recently wrote a tool which can populate our DNS entries in either Route 53 or another provider (can't recall which). So if one goes down, we can run a script which brings up our DNS entires in the alternate provider. I guess someone could service-fy this and have a meta-DNS service which let you switch backend providers. Make it so.

tux1968 14y ago
You could leave them both live with your name server entries pointing at both as well. Then there is nothing to do if only one of them goes down. Waiting until one goes down will mean that requests aren't being served to anyone getting a cached DNS entry with references to the previous hosts.

franklaemmer 14y ago

After a similar DDoS attack on the german provider InternetX we simply set up our own backup name servers. One can do this on a VPS.

rb2k_ 14y ago

Another nice options is Cloudflare. Especially for small personal blogs, they are free and even offer to put a CDN in front of your data.

vegardx 14y ago

Another option is the Linode DNS Manager. They also have a pretty decent (as far as I can tell, never used it, have my own solution) API for managing them. Or you can just do it via the website. As far as I can tell it's free of charge, as you only need to be a member, but since I host two of my external DNS servers there I cannot actually check that you don't have to be a customer. Maybe a fellow HN user can verify? On another note, hosting DNS is really easy once you get the grip on how things work.

d503 14y ago
When I stopped my Linodes I'm pretty sure I remember they warned that my DNS would be stopped along with them, so I do think you have to be a paying customer for that to work.

BryanB55 14y ago

I'd also recommend taking a look at cloudflare, their DNS service is supposed to be pretty fast, I haven't done any measuring myself but here's a recent post they wrote: http://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-aka-kickassdns http://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-aka-kickassdns So far I've been very happy with their service and it's nice to not only get good DNS hosting but also some security and CDN support. I switched everything away from Godaddy along time ago. In the past, oh I dont know, maybe year or so, it seems like Godaddy has received so much negative publicity. First with the elephant killing, then with supporting SOPA and now this.

MikeKusold 14y ago
I just switched to them yesterday. They have a very nice import tool that matches up all your CNAMES and other records.

zhoutong 14y ago

You can get a Anycast zone (basically it's Route 53) for free with a domain on NameTerrific. Also the registration is handled by eNom, so you can switch your domain registrar at the same time. https://www.nameterrific.com/ https://www.nameterrific.com/ Disclosure: I'm the founder of NameTerrific.

azarias 14y ago

Just moved ours to Route 53 in the afternoon. I had been on the fence lately, especially after doing a few of the tests on http://cloudharmony.com/dnstest http://cloudharmony.com/dnstest, but the move so far has been simple, and new relic reports nearly similar results for us.

jaytaylor 14y ago

Another option that I've heard good things about is called PowerDNS. It's full-blown DNS server which includes a RESTful API. http://www.powerdns.com/ http://www.powerdns.com/ https://github.com/Habbie/powerdns https://github.com/Habbie/powerdns

mbell 14y ago

Side note: If your moving and need to figure out a way to redirect a naked domain without having to run a server, and also happen to be using Google Apps then Google Apps will actually do this for you. Its in the Domain settings in the admin panel.

mpclark 14y ago

It might be worth mentioning for those that aren't totally confident with DNS that (a) errors in setting up your DNS can take your services off line in unexpected ways (anyone else ever forgotten to put in an MX record and only realised three days later they weren't getting any email?) so be careful, and (b) at the low end one advantage of letting your host manage your DNS is that they can make changes behind the scenes -- for example, changing the IP of your website or moving your account to a different physical machine -- and they'll just update your DNS and everything keeps working. If your site is hosted somewhere like DreamHost but you put your DNS somewhere else, one morning you will wake up and find your site is no longer accessible and you'll have to remember that this is probably why.

Dylan16807 14y ago
The RFC says that if there isn't an explicit MX record then it implicitly falls back onto the A record. But I'm sure many implementations screw it up.

rdl 14y ago

I really wish Route53 did secondary DNS using normal bind zone-transfer protocol.

marcamillion 14y ago

If GoDaddy is my domain registrar, but I host my domain on CloudFlare and GoDaddy goes down, will my domain go down?