DNS & Domain Hosting

[MatthewL]

Currently my domains are hosted with 1&1 but I am looking to purchase more, I am not keen to stay with 1&1 and currently all my DNS is done via Dreamhost my webhost.

 

I am looking to move to move to either 123 reg or Fasthosts, one thing I need to know is can I modify my DNS entries easily and myself without any restrictions?

 

Any things I need to look out with either of these? Eventually I will be moving the other domains over as they expire with 1&1 as I am paid up and dont want the hassle of tagging with nominet.

 

Cheers

[ellsandell]

Not used either I am afriad.

 

Personally I use Vidahost/LCN and Cloudflare for the DNS side of things.

[ZeroHour]

We used to use 123 reg but the lack of 2FA basically ended that, now we use Ghandi.net and although they are not the cheapest ever the service is good. They can host your dns entries or you could also move DNS onto cloudflare and manage via that as Cloudflare have one of the fastest nameserver response times on the market.

Waiting for them to expire is a bit risky as once they expire it can take several weeks before you can rebuy them and bots literally can snap them up in a second so I would migrate any important ones. It takes a couple of days to process but its not a major deal, just ensure your whois information is correct and if you have updated/changed it allow a day or so for it to propagate.

[MatthewL]

Thanks, Vidahost looks quite good, pricing is good and they seem to have a UK support base.

 

Thing with Cloudflare for me is lack of UK presence, have heard of them before but ideally want to keep me domains hosted where I can get UK support is need be. Also migrating domains wasn't going to rush it, got a few years on them, thing with 1&1 I could never purchase them for any period, with 123 and Fasthosts you can buy them up for years.

[matt40k]

Look at Mythic Beasts - https://www.mythic-beasts.com - based in Cambridge, really good bunch of people, drop them a tweet or a email. They support alot of open source stuff, like Debian meetup, they do the Raspberry Pi webhosting. They offer domain privacy by no extra charge (even on .com etc). Not many web hosts who build a fort out of old 1u servers before recycling them - http://blog.mythic-beasts.com/2014/11/17/server-castle/ and not many you can meetup at the pub with!

[twin--turbo]

I have used both 123 and Fasthosts .

 

123 was originally opted for to host DNS by my colleague, it was dreadful for a number of reasons.

 

I used UKREG/FASTHOSTS personally and we migrated to that, still with them 5 years on.

 

My Domains must have been on FH for ~8 years. The only problem was a major outage due to flooding about 3 years ago ~3hrs or so.. Not good but they presumably have sought to mitigate future issues.

[ZeroHour]

Thing with Cloudflare for me is lack of UK presence, have heard of them before but ideally want to keep me domains hosted where I can get UK support is need be. Also migrating domains wasn't going to rush it, got a few years on them, thing with 1&1 I could never purchase them for any period, with 123 and Fasthosts you can buy them up for years.

 

They do have a DC in the uk. Because of their size there is very little outages and dns is free hosting, you wouldnt host your site just the dns and point to your hosting company in the A record. You would still need to use a domain registrar anyway but cloudflare have very few outages. I would try to ensure whoever you go to have 2 factor auth support for login's management as 123-reg got pretty scarey after I realised it may be possible to transfer out domains with very few notifications until its too late.

[pete]

We've used Fasthosts in the past and wouldn't again - aside from the miscommunication during outages they regularly messed up billing.

 

I'll second @matt40k's recommendation for Mythic Beasts and throw in Krystal Hosting (krystal.co.uk), who've been good for the last few years I've been with them (they bought out my old host) and we've had a couple of work domains with them for about a year without issue. If you mention you're a school, there's a 50% discount.

[ZeroHour]

We've used Fasthosts in the past and wouldn't again - aside from the miscommunication during outages they regularly messed up billing.

 

We have had some experience with them as well: Fasthosts brings down Edugeek - and leaves it there • The Register that was a while ago though.