Should You Add Premium DNS?
You may or may not have heard of it before, but Premium DNS is definitely something you should consider activating for your domain. Not only is Premium DNS meant to protect your website from going down during major DDoS (Denial of Service) attacks, DNS lookup times can be cut in half making it a no brainer from a performance perspective. In this article I will capture a few response tests for aynimedia.com before I enabled Premium DNS and then we'll examine average response times after.
How Much Does It Cost?
As someone who has built websites consistently for a number of years, I made the switch from Bluehost to Namecheap a while back and couldn't be happier. Premium DNS is an available add-on for many domain providers but in this article I'll primarily focus on Namecheap, Bluehost, and GoDaddy.
GoDaddy = $2.99/month | Namecheap = $4.88/year ($9.98 Renewal) | Bluehost = N/A!
Overall, it generally does the same thing, regardless of which provider you choose. Premium DNS will add a layer of security or protection to ensure your website can remain online when DDoS attacks occur, it will improve performance and redundancy, often provide advanced reporting and analytics, and more. DNS information gets distributed on multiple servers around the world. This means that visitors searching for your site will connect to the closest server, resulting in a faster response time.
DNSSEC protects the look up process and verifies that your visitor is truly arriving at your website.
Ya, a lot of that may be TMI for many of you so to summarize, Premium DNS provides faster performance, greater reliability, and better security. Who doesn't want that for their website?
The information in the above table was last updated on May 16, 2016 and was taken from namecheap.com. The information for each competitor in the comparison table may not include certain features, functionalities, or quantities.
Performance Test Before Adding Premium DNS
As promised, lets examine a few different tests from a Sunday evening and Monday morning of how aynimedia.com was responding before I activated Premium DNS using namecheap. Namecheap uses Verisign DNS for its Premium DNS offering and what we want to review is the average response times to see if they've improved once I setup Premium DNS. All tests were run using: http://www.solvedns.com/dnsspeedtest.
Average DNS responses for Sunday evening and Monday morning:Sun. = DNS1 (
112.68ms & 111.99ms | DNS2 (
64.8ms & 64.67ms)
Mon. = DNS1 (114.32ms & 114.19ms | DNS2 (62.44ms & 63.08ms)
Tue. = DNS1 (108.64ms) | DNS2 (61.7ms)
Performance Test After Adding Premium DNS
Ya, I get it, we all want to rush to the results! Have a look at the average response times in milliseconds below and you'll see how Premium DNS has improved aynimedia.com. The only concern I have is how New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles are impacted. Ironically, response times are slower on pdns1 than the default dns1 before adding Premium DNS. I know there are different factors that could impact this but it's something I'm going to keep an eye on. My two cents, even if you buy it at $4.88 for one year to try out the service and then renew annually for $9.98, I still think it's a bargain. So many business owners stop at just buying their domain. Do yourself a favor and add Premium DNS! It's a small investment that should benefit your website.