Basics of Free DNS Hosting
Choosing a reliable and high-quality provider of free DNS hosting is critical if you are currently in the process of expanding your existing website or building a new one. A good DNS host is like your best friend in this case. With a trusted DNS hosting service, you can enjoy better reliability, redundancy, speed, and security.
As a website owner or manager, one of your worst nightmares is for people to visit your site only to find out that it is down. Unfortunately, with the ever-increasing number of Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attacks where web services can get overwhelmed with tons of requests, the danger of your website collapsing under the heavy load will always be present, whether you like it or not.
This is the very reason why it is important to choose a high-quality provider of DNS hosting to ensure the redundancy of your site. Aside from this, if DDoS attacks, configuration errors, or infrastructure failure takes place, it will never be enough to just have one dedicated DNS server. You need several DNS providers on various networks to guarantee DNS availability and lower the possibilities of DNS downtime.
Today, you can find DNS hosting in a selection of options and packages. Many DNS hosting service providers may charge you for their services. But the good news is that there are also great providers of free DNS hosting.
But before you learn about these providers of DNS hosting that offer their services for free, there are some basic pieces of information you need to know first before you choose your next DNS host.
What is DNS?
DNS or domain name system translates human-readable information, including the website, domain name, and other types of internet resources, into IP addresses or addressing protocols that computers use to locate and navigate information online.
With the help of DNS, it will be easier for you to remember phrases and words, such as Google and Netflix, instead of a long string of numbers. It may sound complex but if you look at it closely, the basics of DNS queries are very straightforward and simple.
Every website has its own corresponding nameserver. To view a particular website, you will have to connect to its nameserver so that you can retrieve the IP address of that site as well as other related files.
When someone types NameIt.com into the browser bar, for example, their browser will try to translate the domain name NameIt into an IP address. The process will involve querying or asking the DNS to find the domain name server of NameIt. If the nameserver of NameIt is not accessible, the browser of the visitor will not be able to find the IP address for the website to be displayed.
If you already have a domain but don’t have a domain nameserver, whenever someone searches for your website, they will only see the error that says that the site cannot be reached because your website doesn’t have a host.
Importance of a Reliable Free DNS Hosting
It is critical to choose a reliable and trusted DNS hosting provider since it can impact almost everything, including your website’s redundancy as well as its speed and more importantly, even its security.
Redundancy
It is never recommended to have just a single point of failure if you are a business owner. Providers of DNS hosting services let you configure secondary nameservers. However, you may assume that it will not affect the rest of their services.
This is similar to keeping a backup of the files on your computer on an external hard drive that you keep safely secured in your home. However, when a fire breaks out, you may lose not only your computer but also all the files in it.
In the same way that you need to store backups offsite, it is also important to use several DNS hosting providers. The most common approach here is to configure one of your DNS providers as your primary host, while the rest are considered secondary and slaved to your primary provider.
It means that all of your records will be synchronized from your primary host to your secondary ones. For instance, if a lookup has failed and timed out to the first DNS server, it will query the next DNS server until the right IP address has come back. But if it cannot be resolved, you will see it in the famous error that says that the website is not available. This only goes to show that DNS services can also go down.
However, since internet service providers or ISP’s cache DNS, if the first provider has gone down, it will continue to query your first DNS server for some time before it queries the second one. The easy and quick fix for this is to just make a temporary change to the TTL setting for your DNS record and route the traffic to your second DNS server up until the outage gets fixed.
The general practice here is to keep a longer TTL for your DNS records since your ISP will cache your DNS and the users may not even take notice when the free DNS hosting provider only goes down for a bit. If your TTL record, for example, is set to a week on a Monday, and the DNS provider is down starting from Monday night to Thursday, users won’t see or notice any downtime because your IPS has cached the DNS.
Speed
Another factor that plays an important role in your choice of free DNS hosting provider is speed. Choosing a fast DNS hosting provider will guarantee less latency between the TTFB and the DNS lookup. A website speed test tool can help you test the TTFB and DNS lookup time.
DNS hosting service providers have multiple POPs as well. It is better if there are more locations because it means that there is a higher chance that a DNS server is near the visitor, reducing the lookup time. However, once again, take note that DNS can also be cached by ISPs so your DNS servers will get fewer queries if you set a longer TTL.