I am not very sure whether you guys have heard of EditDNS. Well, it is a DNS host which offers their basic services for free. And if you require some additional features, you will need to “donate” a small sum in order for these features to be activated. I have tried their service and was so impressed that I am currently a “premium” member. You get to be a premium member by donating.
If you are just looking for basic DNS hosting like your A, MX, TXT, CNAME and PTR records, you can do it with EditDNS and this is free. You can also use their DNS Server as an backup (secondary) Name Server. They also offer free web forwarding and email forwarding. They have both US and Europe servers. You have the option of having only US or Europe servers or a mix of both. You can also use their email re-routing feature, which re-route all your emails to non-standard ports if your ISP blocks port 25. Furthermore, you can make use of their dynamic DNS service if your ISP provides you with an dynamic IP address.
If you donate (that’s a small sum of US$5 or more around the same as your daily Starbucks Coffee), you can get email hosting (with spam and antivirus filtering) for your domain. This can be a good (and cheap) solution for anyone who just need to use email for their domain. You can also use their servers as an email spam and virus filtering relay. This acts as a relay which clears spam and virus from your emails before forwarding to your actual email server. I think this is a very good feature which I am using now. But note that having a relay can slow down the speed at which you will receive email because mails are routed to the relay first before sending to your actual email server. In addition, if your webhost don’t provide a backup email server, you can make use of EditDNS to host your secondary email server as backup. If your main email server goes down, the backup mail server will accept your emails for you and later forward to your main mail server once it is up. If you like, you can use Private Name Servers for branding purposes as well.
This service seemed very reliable and they don’t leave a huge gapping hole in your pocket either. I myself did not face any problem when using EditDNS and from reading their forums, any problems are solved quite quickly. Not bad, not bad at all, considering a lot of users are using their service for free. And not to mention, they do offer a lot of very nice features. You should also read up on my other article – List of Free DNS Hosts.
EditDNS has recently eleminated all of their free services except straightforward dynamic dns. Their fee is $60/yr.
The motivation was a DDOS attack, although it is hard to see how their change in payment structure will prevent such problems in the future. Instead, had they shown a little more dedication to professionalism and security, the effects of the attack might not have been quite so hard to manage.
On the other hand, given the price of their free service, there too much to complain about.
Now that almost all of what they provide is a paid service, some are questioning the rate. The response has been that their price is cheap, and they “cannot” provide a multitiered price scheme. The response seems to show a lack of understanding of how to run a business, and raises questions about how well things will be run in the future.
While they certainly have every right, and probably should, charge for everything they provide, the unwillingness to even discuss various payment schemes with the many people who have come to rely on their services suggests they probably aren’t worth spending money on.
A little time searching shows quite a few other providers of free and paid DNS services, and many of the paid services are less, or no more expensive, and probably much more professionally run.
Arron