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.
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.
Some other alternatives that aren't free, but are highly reliable are: http://dyn.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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess someone could service-fy this and have a meta-DNS service which let you switch backend providers.
Make it so.
Also the registration is handled by eNom, so you can switch your domain registrar at the same time.
Disclosure: I'm the founder of NameTerrific.
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.
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.
