Friday fun: GeoDNS now in Beta

We’re pleased to announce that GeoDNS is now in βeta.

GeoDNS enables you to serve different DNS data based on four globally geographic regions:

1. North America (East)
2. North America (West)
3. Europe
4. Asia

This may be useful if you are streaming content from multiple datacenters or want to direct traffic from different parts of the world to different storefronts.

We’ve seen pricing on GeoDNS ranging from $200/month to $2000/month per record. We’re not kidding. So after 14 years of always being called “easyDNS: more expensive but worth it” it’s always a lot of fun for us when we can turn a pricing model upside down.

With this in mind, GeoDNS is available as a component of Enterprise DNS, which means you can enable it for as many records as you want inside your zone and it’s included at $9.95/month. If your lookups exceed 5 million per month then our additional pricing kicks in at our $2/million rate.)

So now you can have geoDNS and Anycast DNS across nearly 20 global POPs and you don’t have to do a mezzanine funding round to get it.

Because this is a beta feature, we are also turning up a free trial on Enterprise DNS. Any existing domain here can simply upgrade their domain to Enterprise DNS and try it out for 30 days.

To enable GeoDNS for your zone follow these simple steps:

 

If you’re not already on Enterprise DNS level, go into your Domain Overview tab and on the “Service Management” line click on “Change”:

 

After your upgrade, go into your User Info, click Edit and enable Beta down at the bottom, then  into your Account Preferences and enable GeoDNS:

Once that’s turned on, you will see a line appear in your Domain Overview module with your geozones, where you activate the ones you want to define:

Things to Know about using GeoDNS

Here are the caveats:

1. This is one of those circumstances where once you turn it on, you have to wait a few hours for all of the nameservers in our cloud to “clue in”. We tried to eliminate all those “wait for this to kick in” choke points on the new system, but we have one here. Once the new config take place, all future DNS edits are instantaneous again.
2. Right now, dns4 doesn’t support the geoDNS. If you use dns4 then those queries will be served from your “default” area. You could either remove dns4 from your delegation (leaving you with a measly 19 global POPs over 3 anycast strands) until we bring dns4 into line, or leave it knowing that a portion of your traffic will be unshaped and flow to your default zone. (The reason for this is because that the dns4 anycast constellation has a different underlying architecture requiring a different approach. We’re working on that now.)
3. This is zone based geoDNS, you do not get “country level” granularity. Having said that, all DNS Pro level domains have country-level geotargeting built into the URL forwarding, and have for over a year. (The ironic thing is this: you will actually get higher accuracy from using URL geotargeting than you will from geoDNS, because with the former you see the remote clients actual IP, firewall or at worst a proxy; while with the latter you only see their DNS resolver, which could be anywhere.)

So there you have it. Take it for a spin, try it out, let us know how you like it.