In one of my recent trips to Japan, I tried logging in to my Software Projects account from a broadband connection, and was surprised to experience a 12 second load time.

Subsequent attempts to access the site were super fast, but I couldn't get that initial 12 seconds delay out of my head.

I tried accessing other popular sites and noticed something very interesting -

Top tier sites such as MySpace, SalesForce.com, eBay and Google were super fast to load. But with other sites I noticed the same initial 12 second load time.

Further investigation was in order.

Turns out the initial 12 second delay was DNS related. Domains that were never accessed from my hotel's ISP, had to be resolved for the first time and that turned out to be quite a bottle-neck.

Determined to find a solution, I did some digging and learned about UltraDNS. Leaders in mission critical DNS services, UltraDNS provides hundreds of distributed domain name servers across the world, with no single points of failure and multiple built-in layers for performance.

MySpace, SalesForce, Amazon.com, Oracle, Petco and many other leading companies all rely on UltraDNS. Public case studies reveal noticable load-time improvements once companies implemented UltraDNS.

How long do your visitors wait for your site to load?



UltraDNS is a product of NeuStar. We contacted the company and will be implementing UltraDNS for all of our hosting clients. I will post a note under the Hosting category once we're live with UltraDNS.

This great service starts at $15/month for 5,000 queries. For $100/month you get up to 100,000 queries.

Okay...sure..
The problem comes when you don't change a thing with your service (no changes to TTL's - no new services - nothing....)

Suddenly, you discover an invoice from Neustar (UltraDNS) that claims that your monthly queries went from 6,000 to 7,000 to 8 million.

And their support people? "Oh....well...we don't know...but it IS legitimate traffic....so pay us!"

Ya see..the $15/month service also has overages for every 1,000 you go over...but no real documentation on where they came from.

If you kick and scream enough, someone will run a report for you and say "hmmmm.....well...we see there were 2,000 queries for your MX record!"

DO NOT GO WITH ULTRADNS...NEUSTAR ULTRA SERVICES - THERE ARE PLENTY OF FREE AUTHORITATIVE DNS SERVICES TO GO WITH!!!!!

Oh! and good luck should you talk to their sales people! These people lie on a regular basis!

The key to fast DNS lookups internationally is IPAnyCast. There is one other company offering IPAnyCast and a very redundant architecture located around the world. I've been using them for about 6 months now and saw my revenue increase dramatically just due to the load times decreasing.

dnsmadeasy.com is the provider and the cost is minimal for a great service so far.

Jeff - Thank you. You are the second person to mention a bloated unexpected invoice coming from UltraDNS.

One of our clients contacted me after posting about UltraDNS and shared they signed up and received an invoice for $10,000.

I'll be sure to do some more research about this and look into other options.

Chris Kenworthy - Excellent suggestions. I'll be sure to check out DNSMadeEasy