DNS Services for a registrar

Fri Aug 12 16:29:57 UTC 2016

On 2016-08-12 11:36 AM, Keith Stokes wrote:
> Route53 can get expensive for lots of domains. Queries are cheap with the first 1M free, but if you have 1000 domains you’ll pay $500/month.
If you had 1000 domains, you'd pay $110/month, not $500.   The first 25 
domains at $0.50/month each, after that it's $0.10.   And that's based 
on the publicly available pricing -- they have special pricing if you're 
hosting >500 domains.

Including queries, if each hosted domain had a million queries a month, 
your total bill would $310.

That's probably a high estimate because it doesn't account for the >500 
domain special pricing and your average registrar-hosted domain doesn't 
get anywhere near 1M queries a month.  Your actual bill would probably 
be significantly less.

> You can build dedicated servers in multiple AZs and data centers able to handle that many domains for far less.
If you were to use c4.large instances, it would cost just under 
$400/month to have 6 instances spread across 2 regions with 3 AZs each, 
after instances, load balancers and bandwidth.  That's assuming you do 
the discounted 1-year, no-upfront-fee term on the instances.

And you're still not as redundant or fast as Route 53, which is anycast 
from way more than 6 places.

The math gets a little trickier when we start looking at labour costs 
for both initial development of your platform and ongoing maintenance, 
but from strictly an infrastructure cost perspective, I don't think the 
claim that it would cost "far less" to run your own infrastructure is 
necessarily true for a registrar-doing-hosting scenario.