Way back in April 2009, I read two articles about using Pingdom to test hosted DNS services. Pingdom has a limited free account, includes several types of web-related performance tests and has test servers in over 25 locations throughout North America and Europe. I started using it immediately and have been very pleased with their product and service.

I’ve been wanting to test the performance of hosted DNS services that include at least one domain for free. Two years later, I finally got around to it. All tests were done with my own domain name.

Each test covered eight days (except Afraid, which I ended early after six). I would have preferred to run the tests concurrently over a longer period of time. If I missed anyone, please let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

Name	Uptime	Response	Std Dev	Notes
Namecheap	100.00%	82 ms	175 ms	Includes free email forwarding.
ClouDNS	100.00%	93 ms	319 ms	Excellent user interface.
Moniker	100.00%	114 ms	248 ms	*** Included with domain registration. ***
ZoneEdit	99.65%	91 ms	280 ms
GeoScaling	99.78%	103 ms	332 ms
XName	100.00%	117 ms	325 ms
DNS Exit	99.98%	256 ms	1025 ms
FreeDNS	100.00%	187 ms	530 ms	Website down for days recently. No comment on why.
Afraid	80.45%	223 ms	1022 ms	Sub-domain sharing. Down 4 mins every 19.

I recommend Namecheap and ClouDNS. If you are willing to pay for DNS services, there may be faster and more reliable options. I’d love to try out easyDNS and DynDNS but neither have a free option.

UPDATE May 2011: Namecheap’s DNS service has recently experienced two outages: one due to a denial of service attack and the other caused by a misconfigured DNS entry at another registrar. Their service is relatively new, so I hope they handle these types of issues better in the future. I appreciate the honesty and openness with which they have reported these issues. ClouDNS is also experiencing intermittent downtime, but has not mentioned anything. END UPDATE

Here are the charts to give you a visual idea of the test results. Pingdom needs to allow customers to control the vertical scale. I’m just too lazy to make my own charts using their cool API. :)

Namecheap

ClouDNS

Moniker

ZoneEdit

GeoScaling

XName

DNS Exit

FreeDNS

Afraid

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