DNS Hosting and Amazon Route 53

[Solecord]

Anyone who is knowledgeable with DNS, can you answer some questions about Amazon Route 53 service?

Amazon Route 53

It says they charge $0.50 / hosted zone / month. That means the entire DNS zone for quakeone.com (all A records, CNAMES, etc.) is $0.50/month right? The A records and CNAMES are all part of the 1 zone?

They also charge $0.500 per million queries of the zone. Do you know how often a request would access the DNS server, because they should be cached, at least for a time, by you locally or your ISP locally right? Right now, all records for quakeone.com have a TTL of 1 hour. Do local users or local ISP's use different TTL's? Any idea on how to gauge how many queries would be utilized?

[Solecord]

Planetnine, those predictors are not accurate at all. I can tell you I'm breaking even or losing on hosting the site. The ads barely cover the hosting costs. I'm not in this for the money though, so it's all good. The ads were added as simply a helper to offset the hosting costs ($44.50/month for hosting).

Right now I'm using Godaddy's Premium DNS, which I got for 60% off the regular price on some special sale last year, however it's Godaddy... so I've been looking for alternatives. Amazon's Route 53 seems cheap for a single site (like you said, it seems geared towards larger corporations), however there's no order limit so I could switch over to that. I'm just concerned about that per-query cost. Godaddy offers unlimited queries for a flat monthly/yearly fee. I could use free DNS from Namecheap (where I have all my other domains hosted), but they have limits on the number of records you can add to a zone.

[Tremor]

How much bandwidth does this site average per month?

[Solecord]

Average about 90GB/month. The high was 105GB in August. The low was about 65GB in March.

[Tremor]

Hmm. You might consider hosting this site with Linode or rackspace cloud servers. Both are cloud VPS, and linode charges straight $20/month for a 512(ram) vps and 200GB per month bandwidth in/out. You can mange your DNS with them as well.

[Solecord]

512MB RAM won't cut it. That is what I used to host this site on, and I had to bump up because MySQL (mainly) + qstat was causing me to max out the server. It doesn't help the site runs vBulletin which isn't the most efficient.

Right now I'm on a VPS with 1.5GB RAM, 150GB disk space, and 4,000GB of bandwidth (heh). [I do host other web sites on the VPS, but this is the only site with measurable traffic.] I can manage DNS with my hosting provider, but if I ever switch providers, then it's not as easy to switch with little to no downtime.

[Tremor]

Good points, although I think you may be able to get away with it if you ran nginx and gave MySQL a thorough tweaking.

[Solecord]

I have a "managed" hosting plan and they supposedly tweeked MySQL... I don't know enough about managing/running MySQL to know if it's done correctly or not.

It was also suggested to switch from apache to litespeed but the host charges $12/mon for litespeed.

The other requirement I have is needing full root access to install and maintain qstat.

My current host is a managed provider so the cost is more than an unmanaged provider. I'm more of a programmer than a sys admin though so I don't mind paying more for the fact that anything goes wrong system wise, my host will take care of it for me in a relatively quick timeframe.