IBM NS1 Connect Reviews

My main use case for IBM NS1 Connect is to improve user experience. It offers smart routing which helps sites to be reliable and performance to get improved. In my organization, the use case was huge traffic and it was very necessary for the system to be responsive all the time.

IBM NS1 Connect is very useful when system demand is very high and more traffic is coming. It's very efficient and gives the best return on investment.

I also use IBM NS1 Connect in managing DNS for the applications with ServiceNow. Low latency and smarter traffic routing are one of its key features that impressed me a lot. This helped to address the automation challenges that I come across when working with tools such as SNOW and needs a reliable service delivery across all environments.

The best features IBM NS1 Connect offers, in my opinion, are real-time monitoring, intelligent traffic routing capabilities, and being API driven.

The intelligent traffic routing and API-driven features of IBM NS1 Connect have helped my team by allowing routing based on user location, endpoint switching based on latency, and DNS response time. Additionally, IBM NS1 Connect has API integration.

IBM NS1 Connect positively impacts my organization by making our website load faster and enhancing the user interface to be more intuitive and user-friendly. It's very economical and cost-effective. I also love it because it saves time through automation, saving around 30% to 35% of our time and also saving man-source. Our application uptime has improved by 40% to 45%. Although there have been a few outages, the service uptime has significantly improved our trust with clients. It is very cost-effective and affordable, hence providing a great return on investment.

To improve IBM NS1 Connect, I suggest additional monitoring services should be added in the dashboard and DNS timeout issues should be resolved.

Furthermore, the user interface of IBM NS1 Connect could be made more friendly for less technical users to enable easier usage.

I have been working in my current field for the past six years and seven months.

IBM NS1 Connect is very stable. I have not experienced any downtime or lagging.

IBM NS1 Connect's scalability is very good. It has managed to handle all my organization's growth.

I think IBM NS1 Connect's customer support is great, very responsive, and always proactive, so I do not see any other improvement needed on this tool.

The customer support of IBM NS1 Connect is one of the best I have been able to reach out for. They are very proactive and supportive, available 24/7.

Positive

I previously used Amazon Route 53. While both IBM NS1 Connect and Amazon Route 53 are DNS services, they differ in focus and strength. IBM NS1 Connect is a cloud DNS service designed for complex traffic routing, application performance, and reliability, while Route 53 is a more general-purpose DNS service offering domain registration, routing, and health checks, often used with the AWS ecosystem.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing of IBM NS1 Connect has been that it is one of the most cost-effective tools and very affordable.

I have seen a return on investment with IBM NS1 Connect, as application uptime has improved by 40% to 45%. It provides a comprehensive solution for managing and optimizing traffic steering, such as dedicated DNS which offers a separate solution network for authoritative DNS, ensuring maximum uptime even in the face of outages. I love it also because it utilizes real-time metrics and automated DNS routing decisions to optimize traffic distribution and ensure resilience.

I purchased IBM NS1 Connect through the AWS Marketplace.

I have seen a return on investment with IBM NS1 Connect, as application uptime has improved by 40% to 45%. It provides a comprehensive solution for managing and optimizing traffic steering, such as dedicated DNS which offers a separate solution network for authoritative DNS, ensuring maximum uptime even in the face of outages. I love it also because it utilizes real-time metrics and automated DNS routing decisions to optimize traffic distribution and ensure resilience.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing of IBM NS1 Connect has been that it is one of the most cost-effective tools and very affordable.

Before choosing IBM NS1 Connect, I evaluated other options such as Azure DNS and Cloudflare DNS.

My advice for others looking into using IBM NS1 Connect is that it is very suitable for businesses requiring high application availability, improved performance, and advanced traffic steering capabilities, especially in complex multi-cloud environments, as it ensures maximum uptime. Nevertheless, it's also less appropriate for smaller teams without DNS expertise or those with basic DNS needs where a simpler, less feature-rich solution might suffice.

IBM NS1 Connect has allowed for customizable and easily configurable traffic steering based on factors such as performance, cost, and reliability, thus ensuring optimal application performance, giving more power to the user. I would rate this product a 9 overall.

My main use case for IBM NS1 Connect is to improve user experience, and it offers smart routing, which helps sites to be reliable and performance gets improved. In my organization, the use case involved huge traffic and it was very necessary for the system to be responsive at all times. It is very useful where system demand is very high and more traffic is coming. It is very efficient and gives the best return on investment. In my organization, we also use it to manage DNS for the application within ServiceNow. Low latency and smart traffic routing are key features that impress me. It addresses the automation challenges that we encounter when working with tools like ServiceNow and need reliable service delivery across all environments. Endpoint switching based on latency is great. DNS response time is perfect.

The best features that IBM NS1 Connect offers include routing based on user verification, endpoint switching based on latency, DNS response time, real-time monitoring, intelligent traffic routing capabilities, API-driven functionality, HTTPS redirects, secondary DNS, and API integrations. It helps to connect for external DNS and HTTPS redirects. The ability to have a diverse secondary DNS server is also key. It has been a solid platform for us and we have not experienced any significant issues.

IBM NS1 Connect has positively impacted my organization by providing controlled downtime, reduced downtime, and time saving through automation, as approximately forty to fifty percent of our time is saved through automation and enhanced visibility. The metrics and real-time monitoring are probably the most powerful features. Automation has really saved us time because this tool is able to automate most of the repetitive and time-consuming tasks. We are able to save time because of the automation.

IBM NS1 Connect can be improved by providing learning materials depicting flows that can help users who are completely new to networking, which would be great. Pricing can be more transparent, especially when dealing with tight budgets. The user interface is somewhat complex to adapt, especially for new users. It should be made more intuitive and user-friendly. Disposable online videos and tutorials on how to use this tool would be beneficial.

I have been using IBM NS1 Connect for four years and three years and several months.

IBM NS1 Connect is very stable as I have not experienced any lagging or downtime.

The scalability of IBM NS1 Connect is highly scalable as it grows with my organization's needs.

The customer support for IBM NS1 Connect is very proactive and responsive twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

I previously used Google Cloud DNS, and the reason I switched from Google Cloud DNS is definitely because of the automation capabilities and flexibility that it offers.

I have definitely seen a return on investment with IBM NS1 Connect as it has given our organization more control and flexibility in managing DNS at a global scale, which almost was impossible before. It has made the process more efficient and at a reasonable cost, saving time, effort, and money. The smart traffic routing is the best.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the cost can be more transparent, especially for organizations working on a tight budget.

Before choosing IBM NS1 Connect, I evaluated other options such as GitHub and ServiceNow App Engine.

IBM NS1 Connect is an excellent traffic management system. It helps us to route traffic based on location, latency, and many other factors. The ability to automate DNS management is a key feature that I love. The metrics and real-time monitoring are probably the most powerful features I have witnessed.

My advice to others looking into using IBM NS1 Connect is that it offers great automation capabilities and flexibility. It provides much more control over how traffic is routed when compared with other tools. The operational efficiency is also great when compared to other alternatives, making it a very recommended tool. It is well-suited for applications where the availability of applications is totally crucial and downtime affects business significantly. It also helps when traffic needs to be routed across multiple regions. However, I would not fully recommend it for small-scale environments or teams that have very little network experience, as they might face complexity because of the vast number of features of IBM NS1 Connect.

IBM NS1 Connect is very suitable especially for businesses requiring high application availability, needing to improve performance and advanced traffic steering capability, especially in complex multi-cloud environments, as it ensures maximum uptime. I would rate IBM NS1 Connect overall at eight out of ten.

We basically use their NS1 Managed DNS service as a secondary DNS server. So essentially they front end all of the McKesson DNS queries around the world.

It is a SaaS solution. So, we are using its latest version.

We were moving to this product from 2018 to '19. We were baselining before the pandemic. Nearly as soon as the pandemic started, the DNS queries almost doubled as people were trying to order more of anything related to medicine.

It has absolutely improved our DNS response time. Within our environment, we have customers who are worldwide. Our previous solution was located at a single location. Once we moved to this solution, our customers in Canada and the EU saw vast improvements. Our customers who were already in the United States may also have seen a more improved response time. It was not necessarily as noticeable, but it was probably still on the order of half the response time.

It has reduced DNS maintenance work in our organization, but it is hard to quantify. From an operational standpoint, the work has been reduced drastically. Before the solution, we'd have to send emails and go to portals, all of which takes a fair amount of time and interactions between people, whereas now, it's just an API call and the thing is gone or added. So, from a maintenance standpoint, mainly in terms of maintenance provisioning and deprovisioning, since we don't really see the internals of the SaaS solution, the reduction would be drastic. It would be a tenth of the time.

It has saved us time when it comes to manual processes. When it comes to provisioning, with the solution that we had before NS1, we had to tell clients that we had a one-week turnaround time, but now, we tell them that we can have it for them on the same day or even the same hour, which is pretty significant.

It has improved our end-user experience. A caveat is that with a lot of these things, if you're doing your job well, nobody notices you, and if you're doing them wrong, they're happy to tell you that everything is broken. I can say that so far, the end-user experience has been good. From a service standpoint, it has definitely improved uptime, and we haven't had to call them for any issues or anything to that effect. I haven't seen any problems.

The provisioning is great. They have an API service that is simple to use and very quick. The changes that we make are replicated worldwide in a matter of usually milliseconds, sometimes seconds. They are done very rapidly. That's something that's obviously priceless when we're dealing with things like DNS.

It is great as an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management. It is very simple to use. It allows us to rapidly provision and deprovision things. We are all around happy with the solution.

From a metrics standpoint, the solution that we came from had no metrics. So, it has been great. Their service team is excellent in taking the time to provide reports for both growth and strategic planning. It has been great.

The reporting metrics are great from an API standpoint, but it would be a little bit nicer if there was some type of dashboard around that. There should also be some type of reporting that's more executive-level focused.

I have been using this solution for three to four years.

You generally hear about things when they're broken, and you do not hear from people when things are going great. Going by that, I haven't heard much of anything one way or the other. Looking at online services that evaluate such things, they're always near the top, and my anecdotal input would be the same. It is very reliable and very stable.

It can be very easily scaled, but it depends on your company's internal processes.

It provides scalability to help meet SLAs and customers' demands without adding complexity. They're very flexible in what they can provide and very simple in that too. The more simple something is, the more chance there is of its adherence to the standards in the organization.

From an administrative standpoint, there is really no one who is using this solution at this point. Everything has been automated. So, it is mostly hands-off except for what people need to do specifically. From a service standpoint, the entire company uses it. So, it is being extensively used in the organization at the moment, and there is a recognition of its reliability because I've recently had more and more customers who want to start leveraging it.

In terms of our plans to increase its usage, from an architectural standpoint, it is driven by requirements from the business. So, at this time, there may not be immediate recognition around that or even demand, but down the road, I would expect to expand its scope.

I haven't contacted their technical support. I have only interacted with their customer success team. Our experience with them was absolutely positive. They were wonderful. Their service team was excellent in taking the time to provide reports for both growth and strategic planning and helping us with just about everything that they could do from a validation standpoint.

We did use other solutions previously, but they were non-purpose-driven tools. They were value-added services that Verizon and Sprint, now T-Mobile, sold us. The reasons for switching were scalability and speed of provisioning. 

From a setup standpoint, it was very simple. They also had a great customer success team that helped us along the whole way with just about everything that they could do from a validation standpoint.

In terms of duration, if you add up the actual time of doing the work, it was probably days because of the amount of data, but the actual implementation took longer because of the administrative functions imposed by the organization. It was not because of the tool itself.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we had a phased approach. We took low-touch things as an initial test case and then ramped up to run through the rest of the other ones. When migrating to this solution, the downtime was zero.

From a cost standpoint, it's certainly not the most expensive out there, and it's also not the cheapest, but it does well to balance cost and functionality/reliability.

There are additional costs for different modules if you need them. Otherwise, they can give you very specific pricing for what you need.

To someone who says that they don't need to spend money on a solution like this because they have a free cloud provider or basic DNS, from our specific history, I would say that you get what you pay for. More specifically, NS1 does very well to balance cost and functionality.

We went through a number of solutions. We were balancing specific demands at the time with cost. So, we went to a number of solutions and checked different providers for that. We talked to most of the big ones such as Dyn, Cloudflare, and Verisign. We had a couple of others too. What made us go with NS1 was the balancing of cost and features and simplicity. It was much easier to use than a lot of the other tools.

Depending on where you came from, get ready for a much easier administrative life for yourself.

In terms of maintaining uptime during a major DDoS attack, we haven't seen any attack, which can be read into one way or the other. It's part of our architecture to leverage two providers in case there is an issue with one, but as far as I've been able to tell, I haven't seen any outages physically.

It provides integrations that enable full-stack observability with automatic, real-time adjustments, but it is just not how we're architected to leverage their service.

I'd rate it a nine out of ten. I feel there's always room for growth, but from what they have right now, it's a very solid, very reliable, and very wonderful experience product.

We use Managed DNS to steer traffic for our API. It handles customer-facing records and the upstream selection logic. 

Managed DNS enabled us to build what we have built. No other DNS solution could do what NS1 is doing as efficiently and developer-friendly as needed. When we chose NS1 in 2014, we were selecting from a bunch of other vendors and potential solutions. We were about ready to give up and develop a homegrown DNS solution because we were not happy with everything that existed. By that, I mean every possible DNS provider around the world. No other solution could handle our load, so we were thinking about building our own when we were introduced to NS1. 

Our use case is customized. They developed custom features for us like Managed DNS features filter-chain technology. NS1 has a logic that isn't possible to express with other filter chains. They created a filter that merges using custom logic. It improved our DNS response times in general. We migrated from Route 53 to NS1, and the response time works pretty well for us.

We leverage two things from Managed DNS that we couldn't do with any other solution. One is their filter chain technology, which allows us to shift some of the intelligence we need for the traffic steering to the DNS. The second one is data sources, which enables us to manipulate multiple records simultaneously using NS1's internal message DOS. In our case, we are trying to direct the traffic in over 150,000 different NS1 records to an arbitrary set of repeating responses. 

If we have about 1,000 endpoints, that translates to around 150,000 records. Assuming there's an even distribution, so every time a server fails or an endpoint goes on a level, we would have 150 updates. With NS1, we have one, so this had an even more significant effect. There are situations where we have thousands of specific records sharing the same responses. In that case, there is one update instead of thousands and thousands.

When we chose Managed DNS in 2014, it was the only solution that could do what we wanted, but I'm not sure about the current state of the market. The NS1 API is an API on top of a managed DNS. It's not an afterthought. It's not like the solution existed. 

Someone was sending updates by email. Then a product manager came along and said, "Hey, there is this cool thing. It's called an API. Maybe we should do it?" And they are like, "Okay. Let's do it."  In the case of NS1, they thought about how to use an API to manipulate and retrieve the stuff. It's supposed to be API-driven. Also, NS1 doesn't have hidden features that would not be available over the API. Even their dashboard is built on top of the API. You can leverage all the functionality programmatically. That's what we do.

We don't use their native integrations because we have been customers before these integrations and real-time telemetry existed. Our solution isn't leveraging either of those. Instead, we leveraged their API integration, which was the first thing that existed. Indeed, the API is at the core of how we use Managed DNS. No one goes to the dashboard or manually clicks anything. Everything goes via the API, and we perform hundreds of changes every minute. The API automatically drives everything, so that's the integration we leverage.

We don't use the Pulsar Active Steering feature because we don't have a website. Our solution is being used as an API for other solutions. You can put the Pulsar agent on the website and feed NS1 the information. In our case, we are integrating into third-party sites. We cannot put our JavaScript on their websites for NS1 to provide the data, so we don't.

We've been using NS1 Managed DNS since late 2014, so it's been more than seven years.

NS1 has built advanced solutions for how to stay up during DDoS attacks. I can't recall a situation where NS1 has been unavailable in the last 24 months, and we have very precise monitoring of NS1 availability. Any downtime that might occur would be highly localized and quickly mitigated.

We launched on Thanksgiving and didn't realize it because we were all sitting in Europe. We had to wake up the founders of NS1 with an issue on Thanksgiving Day. They remember it to this day, and every single time it comes up, they always mention that I'm the one who woke them up on Thanksgiving. It was terrible, so I would say you need to plan deployment and keep the NS1 team in the loop because they can help. Their support is excellent. They can help you roll it out. Just don't go crazy and work with them.

NS1 had only four to six people in their company at the time. Today we have 650 employees, but at the time, we had only eight, so NS1 was roughly the same size as us, and we were willing to pay them a lot of money. 

When we first deployed, we flipped the switch, and it didn't work as well as we expected. It wasn't a complete outage, but we had issues in some places with some customers. The NS1 team went out of their way to resolve it on Thanksgiving. We have a post about it on our blog. We called it "Black Thursday."

If you go on our blog and search for "Black Thursday," you can find a post from November 28th, 2014, describing in detail how we shot ourselves in the foot during the transition and how we managed everything. We didn't mention NS1 a lot in the process because we didn't want to. It was completely our fault. 

We migrated, and it was terrible, but they went above and beyond. They even called operators worldwide to tell them to flush their DNS caches because we messed up. It was a great experience but also a massive incident for us. NS1 assigned us a customer success manager and an account manager, and I'm part of the customer advisory board because we are long-term customers. 

Positive

NS1 was the first solution that could express the logic we needed to be hidden behind the records, and we couldn't adapt any other solution to our needs. We tried Dyn and other solutions. Our main requirement was geo-steering, and we wanted to cover every record. We tried to assign the location of that endpoint. Depending on the location of the end-user, we wanted the end-user to be steered to the closest available endpoint. Currently, availability is precisely the issue with the data sources. You have to replicate it repeatedly thousands of times. NS1 simplifies the process.

The other reason we went with NS1 was the sheer expression power of the geo-steering. We struggled with Dyn for weeks, trying to configure their global geolocator to do what we needed. The precision was limited to the continent and a country, but we needed more. NS1 let us geo-coordinate, and NS1 was like, "Okay. We're going to steer it the same." 

The expression capabilities of NS1 and the possibilities of the filter chain were the decisive factors. That's what we wanted to build and what we needed from a DNS. NS1 had it built-in. 

We also previously used Route 53 from AWS. I'm not sure if it improved response times because you can't do much about that. NS1 or AWS manages it, so there is only so much you can complain about availability. It also depends on the level of telemetry that you have. Overall, I would say we saved money by migrating because we could not do what we wanted to do on AWS. On Route 53, we were unable to do it efficiently. We switched to NS1, and they probably saved us between $10 million and $50 million that we would have had to spend building it ourselves.

Setting up Managed DNS was straightforward. When we were migrating, we dumped everything from Route 53 and wrote a small script to import everything into NS1. Then we flipped the main DNS server records. That was our implementation strategy. 

The only preparation needed was to create a bunch of testing records, and we tested it from probes around the world to see how it behaves and performs. Once NS1 was chosen as our go-to solution, it was as simple as that. We eventually exported and pulled the API off Route 53 then pushed it directly to NS1.

Overall, the migration was seamless, but we had an incident in 2014 that we caused ourselves when migrating to NS1. It was our fault, and no one saw it coming. We kind of forget that IPv6 exists, so we created the problem ourselves.

We don't have DNS maintenance work. That's a term that no one in the organization knows, no one understands. If you asked someone in our company, "How much time do you spend on DNS maintenance?" People would say, "What are you talking about? What do you mean by DNS maintenance?" None of my engineers would be able to wrap their heads around it. We don't maintain anything in NS1 aside from the mess we cause with our records and our automation. Otherwise, we don't spend any time maintaining the platform.

If NS1 didn't provide this solution, we would've had to make our own. Once we discovered Managed DNS, we decided there was no way we were building it ourselves. It is now a core service for our product. Without them, I probably would have a massive team today and sink tens of millions of dollars into our custom DNS infrastructure. What's more, we wouldn't be able to do probably 10 percent of what they're doing.

It's fully automated, so it has cut down on manual processes associated with managing DNS by 100 percent. We don't have any manual processes, but otherwise, we would need staff to do something. All the manual processes are eliminated.

I rate NS1 Managed DNS 10 out of 10. If you're thinking about implementing the solution, my advice is to test this stuff and work actively with the NS1 team on the migration. 

My advice would be to talk to NS1, keep them in the loop, and plan it together. Don't try to do it all yourself. 

We are a marketing platform with a pretty wide range of customers around the world, from small businesses, like mom and pop shops that sell shirts, to enterprises like Salesforce or VMware, on the B2B side. Our JavaScript tags and our servers on the customer side generally have to answer requests very quickly, always be available, and not lose any data. Among our products is advertising, and that side is required to answer requests that come in from around the world. Usually they're geo-distributed when they come to us. There are many millions of requests a second that we need to handle.

On the customer side, our use case is simple. Requests coming in from an end user, from their browser, need to be routed to the closest endpoint so that the latency is consistently low. The other requirement is that if one of those regions, in a very rare occurrence, is experiencing problems, we need to be able to clear traffic to a secondary or tertiary region to avoid downtime. In that situation, a little bit more latency is fine, but downtime would not be. To do this, we've always used global service load balancing, or DNS anycast, to an extent.

NS1 has greatly reduced DNS maintenance work in our organization. I used to have to log in just to do user-provisioning. That would be something that took me an hour every time we needed to add or remove a couple of users from the old account. With Okta, I never have to deal with that anymore. And during failures, logging in to the account and searching for what was wrong was pathetic when we were using Dyn. With NS1, the interface is pretty fast.

For example, the other day we had an account customer complaining to us that for certain records we were serving, the necessary certificate was expired. I looked into it and it was because it was being sent to our old CDN vendor and I needed to figure out where this stuff was serviced. I went into NS1 and saw that the record name did not have any traffic on NS1. Instead, it was a record name served via Route 53 on a different account. I could not have done that inside Dyn because there was no reporting breakdown on a per-record or a per-node level. In this case, I just removed an entire DNS. The only thing that was left was Route 53 so I could go directly into Route 53 without losing my mind. It took me about 15 minutes while sitting on the couch to fix it. It easily saves us hours every month. And I rarely log in to NS1 anymore because it just works.

We do less manual stuff now. For instance, to deploy a new region for the advertising side of our business, it would take a lot of very manual work to add records. Now we can just Terraform it. That process has gone from taking the relatively long period of an entire day to being able to Terraform, apply, and be done with it. We don't create new regions very often, but if it has to be done manually it's prone to errors and takes a long time. Now, instead, it's automatic and there's no potential for errors anymore.

Going with NS1 has also improved the user experience for our users. We had more than one situation in which Dyn probes were monitoring from across the ocean and they would cause the data center not to be the one servicing requests anymore. That would cause an increased latency for our end-users and would make the experience worse for our customers. Now that I can select the probes and make sure that the ones that detect if something is up or down are the ones that are relevant for the user experience, that doesn't happen anymore.

For starters, it integrates with Terraform and a lot of our infrastructure is effectively built out using Terraform. That makes all this stuff extremely easy. With Dyn we had to have a separate process to update DNS entries, and only a person like me could do it. Even then, it was going to be a very delicate process. Now, we have it integrated with Terraform and when we deploy, all the entries are created and configuration is done.

As an API-first platform for DNS it is great. The one thing it needs to do for us is be integrated with our infrastructure-as-a-service setup, Terraform. In that regard it beats all of its competitors, including Dyn from Oracle and Route 53 from Amazon. Neither of them support integration with Terraform. Their support team is also great around this stuff.

Secondly, the user interface is pretty fast and it's very easy to get reporting on queries-per-second underneath each record. That means that if we misconfigure something we can very quickly see the results in the metrics. That wasn't the case with Dyn. Being able to see the metrics helps. It helps that the interface is really quick, and relatively easy to use, especially compared to other solutions that we've seen, including Route 53, which we also use.

Technically speaking, there is no one button to enable load balancing like the others, but you can customize the way load balancing works more, to your own specific needs. We took advantage of that for the particular way we want to run our infrastructure. It's a little bit harder to set up compared to what Dyn was, but it's certainly more flexible. That needed to be learned and we played around with it for a little while at the beginning, before doing the migration. But since the migration, everything has been going well.

Another thing that is pretty helpful is that every one of these entries has its own target probe, called "monitors" in NS1 parlance. Each one of these endpoints has a set of monitors and it's possible to choose the regions from which you check the times of an area and the policies. This wasn't possible with Dyn, unless you talked with the account manager, and it would still always be a little off. There were occasions in which Dyn decided that a server in Tokyo was down because it wasn't reachable from San Francisco, and no one cared. Considering that we have a data center in San Francisco, San Francisco traffic shouldn't determine what happens to the Tokyo data center. Using Dyn made things like that a pain to deal with, but with NS1 we have been able to select the specific region from which we are monitoring our endpoints to determine if they are up or down and if they need to be pulled out of rotation. And they have mostly been working fine.

There is also a Slack integration that we set up for our monitors. Whenever a monitor goes down, or there's a down and up, we get a notification in Slack. That means that the routing of requests to our team, for escalating any problem with the DNS, can be done more democratically than we used to be able to do with Dyn. With that solution, it would be sent to the email associated with the account. 

In addition, there are the more intangible things, such as being on an exclusive, dedicated DNS network. I gather NS1 has both dedicated and shared DNS infrastructure, and I think we are on the dedicated. I've never tried the other one, and I don't know how Dyn was set up, but we've never had issues since switching. Everything has worked pretty well.

We use the geo load balancing functionality and there are a couple of things that are helpful there. But the language itself is something we had to get used to a little bit. Some of my folks made a few mistakes in rolling out the Filter Chain. It doesn't return all of the multiple results by default. It returns only one. So we have to add a bunch of operations, like geo-target by first selecting a group in terms of regional proximity and then shuffle the list of potential endpoints and then select the first one. The Filter Chain setup is a bit hard to grasp at first. It would also be nice to have a way to simulate changes in addition to staging. 

Also, right now, as far as I understand, there is no way to do atomic changes to a DNS configuration. You need to make changes record by record and apply. But if someone wants to do more complex stuff like, for example, if I want to migrate from a CNAME to an A record being served, or vice versa, that's typically something that involves first taking out all of the CNAMEs and then adding all of the A records. That would require some downtime. It would be a lot easier if I could just have the new full record with the CNAME or A record, and then be able to replace the nodes directly in a single operation and I don't think they have that.

We started using NS1 Managed DNS in 2018 or 2019.

Except for that one time that they had probe monitor issues, we've never had a single problem with it. It's pretty stable.

We haven't had any issues with the scalability. The scalability helps meet SLAs and customers’ demands without adding complexity. We run more than 4.5 billion queries per month on our DNS, so it's pretty critical that they can handle that volume and it's been going pretty well so far.

We used their tech support at the start a couple of times. We were trying to get onboarded and some of us were getting confused with the setup for load balancing DNS. The first or second time that we dealt with them they decided to just write out for us the way that the Filter Chain was supposed to be.

Another couple of times, they wrote to us first about issues. 

There had been some kind of ongoing event and we wrote to them. They responded very quickly that there was an issue and that some of their probes were down. That told us not to go hunting for anything. Rather, I was able to go in the UI and force probes not to be considered for a period of time in the uptime and downtime of an area. As far as I remember, responses from NS1 were all well within one hour.

Positive

When Dyn was bought by Oracle and then Oracle decided to flip everybody over to a new infrastructure, that was when we decided to switch. We had used Dyn since 2009, and it had been working fine.

Dyn didn't do any automatic migration for us from the old accounts to the new account. Oracle forced everybody to do that. And Dyn didn't develop the platform at all in the preceding six years or so, and there were many features we wanted that they didn't field. We decided that if we were going to have to do the migration by hand anyway, and whatever risk might be involved in that, we might as well consider NS1. NS1 reached out to us, as a customer of Dyn, knowing what was coming. Their sales team did a proper job. We talked about the plan from Dyn and when we talked about their platform we decided to switch.

User management was also a mess with Dyn. Truly the worst part of that solution was dealing with the user management. With NS1 it's integrated with our Okta. We gave access to folks that need access to DNS via Okta, so it's integrated with our permissions system, and Dyn was not.

When we switched from Dyn, one parameter that we used for determining our choice of infrastructure, going forward, was DNS response times. The response time with NS1 is fine. From my own computer it's not as fast as Dyn was, it's just a smidgen slower, but it's still pretty fast. We don't need it any faster than that.

The initial setup of the solution was pretty straightforward. We did it within about 15 days. There was zero downtime in migrating to the solution. If there had been any downtime we would not have done it.

We worked with their customer success team. They helped us set things up at the start, but it took very little time. We did almost all of it ourselves and they gave us a little bit of help on the Filter Chain stuff. I did the switchover myself and everything worked out.

We promised NS1 that we would do the migration in a very short period of time and that we were open to being on their homepage for marketing purposes, and they gave us a good price at the time.

We pay about $30,000 a month. We used to pay about $20,000 with Dyn every month, for lower volume than we're doing right now, but it had none of the features that we have available with NS1, so it was worth it for us. It seems competitive for us, given that we're doing 4.5 billion requests. And when you do load balancing like that for downtime, all of your TTLs are very low. A lot of our TTLs are in the five-minute space. It generates a ton of extra load on the DNS when you do five-minute TTLs. If we wanted to decrease our bill we could just increase our TTLs, but we don't feel like risking that.

If someone were to say to me that they don't need to spend money on a solution like this because they have a free cloud provider or basic DNS, I would tell them that's not true. The free providers don't provide global load balancing. There are no free solutions that do geo load balancing.

If you try the other options like Amazon Route 53 or Dyn or Ultra DNS, the only way you can get geo load balancing is if you use something like Route 53's policy editor. It's graphical only, extremely slow, and there are a lot of limitations to what it can do.

I played around with Route 53 extensively. I have been a member of the customer advisory board of AWS for a very long time now. I really like a lot of their solutions and I tried to get Route 53 going, but it just wasn't good enough, and it wasn't free. It was expensive. There was no way to deal with it without the policy manager, as well.

Dyn is a pain. We had nine years of experience with it and I would not want to use it again. 

If you have normal DNS needs that don't involve advanced features of a DNS, you may be able to deal with Route 53 or another simple DNS solution, although probably not a free DNS service. But if you have anything more complex than the simple stuff, I doubt those solutions will work for you.

We use Managed DNS, and we also partially use functionality from some of their other products such as Pulsar. We generate a DNS map and upload it to NS1 using their API to propagate to their service. Then, we use Managed DNS to find the optimal route for our users to connect to the closest point of presence for them.

We use NS1 as software as a service. We are not having anything on-prem. It is a public cloud from our point of view. We are just using their cloud solution or their service. We are not installing it in our data center. They provide us with an API for us to talk to their cloud implementation.

Telemetry is something that we really care about. We care about the reliability of our edge network, and telemetry services are something we highly utilize. We use it through the NS1 API to make sure we have our dashboards and alerts configured correctly to have visibility in real-time over what's happening with our edge network. This way, we can easily and quickly react if needed or in some cases, act in advance to re-steer and re-adjust our traffic.

We're using Managed DNS with other functionality from NS1, so it improves the latency for our end users. So, we can steer traffic to better locations for users. It is not just based on geographical location closeness. It is based on real user metrics for these users. We also need fewer tools for DNS iterations in DNS management. So, we can have it fully automated by using our code and automation tools that we can build on top of NS1 API.

We actively use its Pulsar Active Traffic Steering feature. We cared the most about performance and latency for our users, and we have been getting significant improvements, especially for some of the corner cases at some of the unusual geographic locations where our users are. We have better performance with good efficiency. It did not reduce our costs, but our users have a better experience. It has resulted in better work.

In case of incidents or events for our points of presence, we are able to steer our users to a better location with RUM DNS, which is a part of the Pulsar product. So, we can provide better latency for them in comparison to simple anycast or geolocation traffic.

We use several DNS maps for the traffic distribution between our points of presence in the edge network. For some of these cases, to decrease the load on our network in a location where we may have limited network capacity, we can actually distill some portion of traffic, but it is less important for us. In such a case, we can avoid potential reliability incidents and bring availability, which eventually can improve our uptime.

Pulsar has saved money on CDN optimization. For some of our use cases, we need to distribute a significant amount of content between our users. So, we can use this functionality by having several route maps to route this content to better locations.

It has absolutely improved our DNS response times. We have seen significant improvements for some corner cases with geolocations that have unusual network connections to magistral lines. For some of the use cases, we have seen more than 10% improvement in our latency after we started using the RUM DNS functionality of Pulsar. We have latency improvements of more than 10% in selected regions.

It has reduced the DNS maintenance work in our organization. We have fully automated tools around NS1 API. So, to do any maintenance, by using the NS1 product, we can easily drain traffic in our point of presence to quickly re-steer our users to other locations. It is fully automated on our site so that we do not spend a lot of engineering time preparing our edge network for maintenance. This preparation time counts towards maintenance time, so we can save a lot of time on this.

We automated the entire workflow on our site. Its automation has absolutely enabled us to assign staff to other work. Automation is always good, and we can reinvest the time of our engineers.

Managed DNS helped improve our end-user experience. It reduced our latency dramatically, and our users' experience is much better now. Latency is not the only metric that it has impacted. It has also impacted reliability. We didn't have any major incidents while using NS1 all this time. Our company's SLA is 99.99%, and we can easily maintain it with NS1.

The Pulsar functionality, map uploading, and real user maps around DNS are some of the valuable things for us.

Another valuable feature is how easily we can interact with their API. We run our infrastructure as a code, so it is really easy for us to describe the whole configuration of the NS1 service by using our service configuration and interact with their API. We like this functionality a lot.

Monitoring is really important for us. We really care about reliability, and we want to make sure that we can remove some points of presence in our sector and in our edge network really fast when we experience any problems. So, monitoring that NS1 provides for DNS is really important for us.

We care about monitoring and telemetry work, and NS1 provides a pretty good system for monitoring. We can monitor our endpoints and points of presence around the world. If there are any issues, we can easily remove them from our network, but this area needs some improvement because it is not always reliable in NS1. In the past, we had a number of false-positive cases when the monitoring system told us about some problems in our infrastructure that were not true. NS1 is improving the system, and we are constantly talking about this with them. I know that they are releasing a new version of their monitoring system, which is really important for us, but this is a different area where we would expect them to improve.

I joined the company two years ago, so this is when I started working with the product, but in our company, we have been using it for a longer period of time. We started using it several years ago. 

Managed DNS is very stable for us. In our company, our uptime SLA is 99.99%, and DNS is crucial here. If the DNS system is down, then there will be a significant availability hit for the whole organization. We have been using NS1 for a long period of time, and we have not had any major outages on the NS1 side that lead to any outage on our side.

We don't have any problems with scalability. Our edge network is growing. So, every year, we add more and more points of presence to our edge network. It means that we need to add more zones for us. So far, we didn't experience any problems with this. It is easy to scale the solution.

We never had any complexity with meeting SLAs and customer demands. We heavily utilize NS1 API, and we have automation on our site around this API. It has worked well so far, and there are no problems with it. Its non-complexity is super important because we want to have everything as smooth as possible and as automated as possible. It helps us to actually achieve these goals.

We have a whole traffic team in our organization that has seven people at the moment. So, we use NS1 within one single team in our company.

It is being used across our whole infrastructure. This is our main DNS provider, and an increase in usage would align with the organic growth of our user base. We don't have plans for any additional increase at this time.

We work with their customer success team. We have a dedicated person from their side with whom we can talk about our problems, our issues, or any proposals we might have. This is a really fruitful collaboration.

We are happy with the NS1 support. They are responsive and professional. They reply to all of our requests. They provide good updates about progress or status on their side, and we can even discuss the next steps. If there are some things that need to be improved, they always propose a good plan for improvement. I'm completely satisfied with their customer service team. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

It was set up before I joined this organization. Its maintenance is done on their side. Because it is a software as a service, all upgrades and maintenance for NS1 services are done by NS1.

We have definitely got a return on investment because this is the core functionality for our company to operate our business, but I don't have any numbers.

To someone who says that they don't spend money on a solution like this because they have a free cloud provider or a basic DNS, I would say that they need to think about reliability and, of course, performance. Those are two main things on the users' side. On the company side or the engineering side, with NS1, it is really easy to have automation in place for management and monitoring.

My only advice is to keep it automated. It is easy to do. NS1 provides the whole platform to run their solution from your infrastructure as a code by using API. You can also use tools like Terraform or any other automated management system. 

I would rate Managed DNS a 10 out of 10. We don't have a lot of issues. Of course, it is a growing product, and there are some areas of improvement for NS1, but just based on our interactions with them and how this product works for our infrastructure, we are completely satisfied. 

We use NS1 to serve our public DNS and we have around 500 domains that we service through it. It is the public resolver for our website and various other entities we own, and it has been pretty good.

The solution is hosted by NS1. 

We have done some DNS load balancing through NS1 and, using the Filter Chain offering, it has been very straightforward. That's what really sets them apart from their competitors. It's very simple to do and very powerful, reliable, and accurate.

In addition, we haven't had any issues at all with uptime when there is a DDoS attack. When we have been the subject of an attack, NS1 has been up and stable for us, as well as performant. On top of that, it has been able to provide us with pretty good details of what kinds of attacks we have been subject to and what NS1 was doing at the time. Even if we are undergoing DDoS attacks, NS1 will still serve DNS for us.

We have also seen an improvement in our DNS response times compared to previous vendors we used that had had some churn on their response times.

NS1 has also reduced DNS maintenance work for us. Being an e-commerce platform, every millisecond counts for a customer, and we definitely struggled there. We do a lot of testing and monitoring of response times and, in other solutions, we were seeing that our DNS responses would be flapping from time to time, meaning sometimes they'd be really fast and sometimes they'd be really slow. In a dashboard or graph view, you'd see spikes, a screen full of mountains, things going up and down, up and down. But NS1 gives us a nice flat line, because it's always performant and fast and that's what we want to see. Every millisecond we can shave off is better for business.

We have also saved time when it comes to manual processes because NS1 is API-first. That means we can automate records, as needed, as part of other processes. And from time to time, as part of troubleshooting, they have a nice feature where you can see if there is a record or multiple records that get an abnormal amount of queries against them. You can see that granularly, down to the actual record view. That is something you can't do on a lot of platforms. The insight we get is really good compared to other solutions.

Another benefit is connected to the fact that we have some FTP servers that partners of ours use to send and receive files. Those servers are fronting several backend servers, although the partner wouldn't know. They connect to one endpoint and, from their point of view, it's just one server, but it's actually several servers. With the other solutions we've had, if maintenance was needed on a backend server, the partner would notice that the server was down. With NS1's Filter Chains and health checks and monitoring all built-in, we can take servers like that out of service and the partner would never know because NS1 just routes them to a healthy server. That kind of stuff is extremely important for us.

• Ease of use 
• Stability - We haven't had any issues at all with the service.

Also, the fact that it's an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management is one of the reasons we looked into NS1. We use it for a lot of automation and metrics gathering and it's been great.

Its real-time telemetry and ecosystem of integrations are very easy to use. We haven't taken advantage of much of that, but the fact that we know those capabilities are there, and that they're pretty straightforward, is key. We have done a few things using their routing protocols that are provided as part of the service and that has been really nice. We can actually do automation around that as needed.

I would like to see the UI updated to allow me to do finer searches. I would also like to have the ability to get reports that can sort based on various metrics. For example, I would like to be able to say, "Show me the top 10 records by total queries" in an easy-to-digest format. If I wanted to do that today, given that we have 500 domains, I'd have to go into every single domain and browse through it to see what is getting hit the most. That kind of filtering functionality would help because our licensing model is based on the number of queries we serve per month. If something goes hog-wild, I want to be able to easily find what that is and then react to it.

We have been using NS1 Managed DNS for about four years. 

If there are scalability issues, they haven't been apparent to us as a customer. As a system engineer, I can empathize and I'm sure they have some internally, but we haven't seen them. The scalability helps meet SLAs and customers’ demands, without adding complexity.

Every customer who hits our website is using NS1, so that is up to millions per day. Internally, it's mostly system engineers who use it to add or remove records and there are about a dozen of them, possibly more.

In terms of increasing use of NS1, we're looking into their internal DNS and DHCP solutions. That would be a complicated migration for us, and we are currently in multi-year agreements with other vendors. The goal would be to start slowly migrating over to NS1 for all of our DNS and DHCP needs, but that will take a few years.

We have a dedicated success manager. We don't need a lot from him, but every two or three months he checks in to see if we have any large needs. We also meet with him once every few months just to touch base.

Their technical support is really quick to respond to concerns. They communicate well and provide feedback that's not only technical but easy to understand if you're not technical. They do a great job.

Positive

We've used other tools like this over the years, obviously, being a publicly exposed e-commerce platform, and we've had some struggles with them. NS1 has been really smooth for us. Most recently we used Dyn DNS. They were purchased by Oracle and, predictably, their offering went downhill after that. Dyn was cumbersome, at best, to get the stats and reports that we needed, and to steer traffic as needed. With NS1, it has been extremely straightforward.

The clincher that made us switch to NS1, for me, was actually talking to their CEO at a conference in New York, in 2017. He gave a presentation on their ability to withstand large attacks. He is a systems engineer/architect/programmer at heart. He knew the tech side of the industry and that gave me the confidence I needed that he actually knew how to solve some of the problems that we were facing.

We then went through some stress tests with NS1 and it was much more performant than other vendors that we had done trials with.

The initial setup was straightforward. There wasn't a whole lot to it. I had to learn the semantics that are specific to the system, but once I did that it was really straightforward.

The deployment took a few phone calls and meetings with our onboarding team and engineers, to go over the scope. The work itself was really pretty straightforward and took just a couple days.

Our implementation strategy was to sync the main zones we care about, like our main ".com" domain, which is a big zone where a lot of our traffic comes. We added the NS1 name servers to that zone, in addition to the Dyn name servers. That meant a customer going to our website would get served through Dyn or NS1 or sometimes they'd bounce around. Once we saw that NS1 was receiving traffic, we let it bake for a couple of days and then we started removing the Dyn name servers, to the point where there was only NS1 left. There was no downtime when we migrated to NS1 from Dyn.

The solution's automation has saved our staff work. As I mentioned, we host about 500 domains and serve DNS publicly through NS1. We were doing a lot of that in-house on our own infrastructure and appliances, through Infoblox. The thought of migrating all of that to another platform was kind of harrowing. But with the NS1 API, it actually took us maybe four hours to do all the work. That kind of stuff is really helpful when you're an assistant engineer and you have multitasking upon multitasking happening. I was thinking that project would take two months, but it took one day to do.

We did not use a third-party.

Our ROI comes from the fact that it has been stable and we've had to spend less time on it than we did with third-party integrations and other solutions that we've purchased. It's more of a set-it-and-forget-it type of platform, which is extremely valuable.

NS1's pricing is much more aggressive than its competitors in the market and you get more value out of what you pay for it.

We went through trials with Dyn, of course, because we were their customer. We had also done some trials with Infoblox, which is another of our vendors, but that was where we were hosting the DNS ourselves and using their appliances. And we did some trials with Akamai, which is our CDN provider—the biggest one on the internet—and they have their own DNS offering.

But NS1 outperformed all of them in terms of the ability to administer it and the actual response times of queries and the propagation of DNS records out to the greater internet. It was much faster, generally speaking, in broadcasting those changes. A DNS has a TTL, a time to live. If you change a record or add a record, it can take up to a certain amount of time to propagate throughout the world, which makes sense because the world is one big connected internet. Akamai was taking a few hours to propagate and NS1 was taking just seconds or minutes to propagate. That was key for us. If we have to make changes because there's a routing issue or an internet issue somewhere in the world, we want to make sure that we can serve traffic. If we need to make some changes on our DNS, NS1 publishes them right away.

If someone says they don't need to spend money on a solution like this because they have a free cloud provider or basic DNS, I would say you get what you pay for and that you're also paying for the time and energy you have to put in, yourself, to do the work.

Perhaps one of the biggest wins for NS1 is that people don't readily know their name at times. That means they're doing a good job and people don't even think about who our DNS provider is because it just works.

I would say use NS1, without hesitation.

We use it for all our external DNSs. We wanted to get away from maintaining our own servers and were looking for the ability to filter records to "steer" DNS requests.

The solution is hosted by NS1. All DNS records are there.

NS1 has reduced DNS maintenance work in our organization because we don't need to manage DNS servers. In addition to not maintaining our own servers, we don't have to update operating systems and handle patches. Those are big savings.

The solution also has a lot of security features to help protect us from DDoS attacks and the like. We don't need to manage that ourselves.

And the automatic steering of requests with the filtered records helps us to utilize our VPN boxes in a much better way. Now, people only need to use one name, whereas previously they had to use many different names to do this. That has helped us enormously.

Along those lines, the filtered records, with which you can build up rules to create load balancing, have improved things a lot, especially now with the pandemic that has resulted in a lot of people working from home. That has really helped the management of our VPN setup to be more flexible in a way that is easier to manage.

NS1 has also definitely improved our end-user experience. First of all, it has servers in different geographic locations. We didn't have that before, we only had them in Europe. And they use a technology called anycast so that a DNS request goes to the closest DNS server for that IP address. That speeds up the DNS resolution for people using the DNS from the internet. It improves performance a little bit for the end-user by minimizing the latency on the internet.

One of the features that is non-standard and that is very useful is the filtered DNS. We have set up our external VPN, which is what all our employees connect through, to use this feature. It's geolocation-aware. In that way, for India we set it up so that these are the servers that should be supporting things, and in the UK these servers, in the U.S. these servers, and in Sweden these ones. If a server is down, it will automatically use a server that is up instead. It's like a load balancer that manages the redirecting of traffic depending on where you are.

The filtered records mean we can set up the rules so that DNS requests are answered exactly the way we want them to be. For example, if my request comes from Sweden, we can have a rule in the filtered DNS setup to go to sslvpnsc.ourcompany.com if it's up. Otherwise, it uses another one. 

The solution has other features where you can import and export data, but we don't use them. We use the more fundamental things, but NS1 is a big help for us thanks to the filtered records.

Another reason we use it is that we use a management tool, where you can update DNS records called Micetro from Men&Mice. It has an integration with NS1 and, for us, this was the perfect combination.

NS1 Managed DNS also has a REST API which makes it easy to integrate things yourself. We collect some statistics by using the REST API. And even if we don't know if we will need it, from time to time we take a backup of all the data records by using that API. It is helpful for automation. The API also made it possible for Micetro to integrate with NS1. Men&Mice used it to integrate their management tool to update, manage, delete, and report, and do everything else you would normally do with DNS from within their platform. The NS1 API is good and flexible.

As for maintaining uptime during a DDoS attack, we haven't noticed anything, so it has been fine from our perspective.

We are in our third or fourth year of using NS1 Managed DNS.

The stability is good. I haven't seen any noticeable downtime.

It's scalable because they have the data in different data centers around the world. Even if one data center is down, a DNS query should be answered by any of the other data centers. That's how the architecture is built. NS1 helps us to meet SLAs and customer demands without adding complexity.

Also, we only use the external DNS, but they have more services that we don't use. So there is scalability from a service perspective as well. We could use it as an internal and external IPAM solution. For functionality, it's really scalable. And with the data centers in different places, I don't think there is a real limitation on the number of DNS records you can have. The scalability is good.

You buy the service with X number of DNS records and Y number of DNS queries. It's also very helpful that, when we see that we are coming close to the limits, we contact our salesperson and they fix it very quickly.

In terms of increasing our usage, we will probably add DNS servers but we will not buy extended services.

Overall, the solution works very well. We have absolutely nothing to complain about. When we have questions or an issue for support, we use email and we get very quick answers and help from the support team. That part works very well. The answers we get are correct. And there were times when I didn't know how to write an API and they did it for me and shared the results.

You always want people to help you quickly. If we compare NS1 to others, it's very good if you can get a correct answer from the others within the same day.

From time to time NS1 has webinars where they discuss different features and what's coming, and that is also good information to get.

Positive

In the past, we ran external DNS on our own platform, but we moved to NS1 instead of having our own servers. But we can still use the same management tool because it supports NS1. We configured everything that we migrated in that tool. Our team is still using that tool, Micetro, that they were using before we migrated. Of course, we also use the web interface from time to time, but we use Micetro to update and manage the more standard DNS records.

The initial setup was straightforward. We got help but we didn't need it. We migrated everything ourselves.

We did it slowly so it took about a month. We have 10,000 DNS records in 300 different zones. We took a number of zones per week and migrated them, moving more slowly in the beginning and more quickly at the end. We saved the biggest zone, which is our .com site, to the end. By then, we had all the needed skills and experience for how it worked. We didn't have any problems during the migration.

There was zero downtime involved in the migration to NS1.

We are a team of 10 people who use the tools that are managing DNS records on NS1. And in total, in our company, there are about 350,000 users, including employees and customers.

There was a consultant that could help with the implementation and they explained how it works from the beginning. They helped us as much as we needed. And then we managed the rest ourselves. 

We don't really calculate ROI on this solution, but if we didn't go for NS1 we would have had to enhance our existing infrastructure of servers. Instead of buying new servers and having to build a new infrastructure, we went with NS1 and don't need to buy servers and keep them updated and patched, which is a very big thing for the moment. In that sense, it's a good investment. It's a kind of outsourcing.

Everything can always be cheaper, but as it is today the pricing is fair. No one in our organization who signs the purchase orders is complaining, and they know what it is and what we are using it for.

We didn't evaluate other options because another part of our company was already using NS1. We also looked at the fact that the tool we use, Micetro, was supporting NS1. That meant we could still use the skills we have on that tool and we could also reuse the part that our company was using and integrate everything together. They would get better support and they could also share their skills with us. That's why we did not look at other vendors.

If you need an external DNS provider, NS1 has been a really good provider for us, giving us exactly what we were looking for and with more functionality than we need for the moment, functionality that we can buy additionally. It gives us a type of fault tolerance because it has DNS servers spread around geographically, servers that support each other. NS1 is a very good way to go if you need to change your external DNS infrastructure.

If someone says they don't need to spend money on a solution like this because they have a free cloud provider or basic DNS, it's their choice. It depends on the need they have. In our case, if we didn't go for NS1, we would have had to replace hardware and set up a new infrastructure for DNS. It was a good choice for us together with the filtered records. That is something we couldn't implement ourselves.

When it comes to manual processes, NS1 has not really changed the amount of work we have. Creating a record is creating a record.

We use NS1 as an external DNS for our services. An external DNS is a simple name resolution for an IP address or other hosts. The cool thing about NS1 is that we can integrate our automation process. It automatically publishes new DNS records without having to look manually through a user interface as you would do with normal DNS providers.

It massively speeds things up. Today, we allow developers to deploy services and have externally facing DNS scrapers that are created automatically without the addition of human intervention.

The operational spectrum is somewhat simplified because there is less to manage. We don't have to manage internal and external DNSs, internally and externally. Instead, it is centralised by NS1 who takes care of upgrading and all the patching. 

They have always delivered within their SLA. It has been spot on. The service has been spotless. This is critical for us. If the DNS record didn't work, because it was under spec'd or capacity, then we would materially lose money as a company since our customers rely on our records to function and perform their financial activities.

The ability to automate DNS creation is definitely paramount.

The solution is an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management. This is exactly what we needed it for since most DNS services don't come with an API. Whereas, being API-driven, NS1 allows us to create automation against it. We can create pipelines, deploy software, and automatically integrate with NS1 in an automated fashion, which is definitely great.

NS1 Managed DNS has helped improve our end user experience, which has sped up our time to market.

We are an external DNS and still maintain an internal DNS. I would like it to have the external DNS separate from the internal DNS. This would give us a sense of security. For example, if there is a problem with the internal DNS, it would not affect the external DNS.

The solution was in place before I joined two years ago. The head of platforms is a friend of mine, so we discussed this solution. It was implemented a full year before my time.

The company has been using it for three years.

The solution's stability is absolutely perfect.

We haven't experienced any downtime whatsoever in the past three years. I am very confident and happy with the service.

We have a platform engineer who maintains it on the client side. From a maintenance point of view, it probably takes a week of engineering's time a year.

It scales perfectly. It is all very transparent.

It is utilised on a weekly basis. Anytime there is a new deployment that requires an external DNS, that goes through NS1. So, records get updated automatically. 

Scalability is something that you can't underestimate with DNS.

We are halfway through the capacity of the service. We are planning to double our userbase by the end of the year, but that won't necessarily correspond to twice the number of requests. Therefore, I would expect an increase of DNS requests to be a third more than they are today.

Our account manager with NS1 has been very good. They are always available.

It has been quite hands-off. In the past two years, we have probably contacted the technical support once. They were spot on. I would give them an eight out of 10, which is conservative, given that I haven't had enough support tickets to really rate them.

Positive

Start with a code-first approach. Try to use the APIs as much as possible from the beginning, instead of being tempted to go through a user interface. Once it is done manually, it stays manual.

We use our client in our infrastructure to communicate with NS1. This client is a bit complex in the way that it is set up. NS1 has their own client solution that you can deploy into your platform to do this, but even that is a bit complex. So, I would like a very simple, thin, light API agent that we can deploy into our platform to communicate with NS1. That would be welcome.

We added another external DNS together with NS1.

On the automation side of things, if we had to manually create all the external entries, it would require a lot of effort, waiting time, and tickets being generated for blockages. 5% to 10% of our automation spectrum is handled by DNS records being generated automatically. Overall, as a company, we do approximately 10 releases a day. Of those 10 releases, if one or two need an external DNS record to be changed or created, then they would get stuck in a queue waiting for a person to create the record manually. So, the solution definitely speeds up our Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).

Assuming 20 releases a month need manual intervention. If there are 240 releases that need an engineer spending about an hour on them, then I would say that the solution saves us 240 hours.

Look carefully at DNS security. In the last few years, there have been several DNS attacks that leveraged DNS protocols. Therefore, it is important that companies actually know what they are doing with DNS. 

I would rate NS1 Managed DNS as nine out of 10. There is room for improvement.

The product is a DNS as a service and we have automated the creation and deletion of all sorts of DNS records.

We needed to have the fastest and most secure and resilient DNS possible, and that's what we got. We don't worry about denial of service attacks on the DNS, as we've seen other large vendors go through. We have access to a significant and forward-thinking feature set that allows us to use things like DNSSEC fairly easily.

Our DNS response times have improved significantly. I have not compared data within the past year but at the time, we looked at a 99.9% evaluation and saw that NS1 was the most effective and fastest solution.

We have access to enterprise tooling that allows us to have a single pane of glass between our internal DNS solutions and our external ones. We also have the ability to use advanced routing techniques with the rules engine or the additional tooling that NS1 provides.

The application traffic management capabilities using the API are excellent. We orchestrate that API using Terraform, which means that there are no manual steps involved in bringing up a piece of infrastructure that needs a DNS record or maintaining hygiene in our DNS records because services are taken down. All of it is orchestrated with the use of the API with Terraform on top to achieve it. Overall, it's a very robust API and it meets our needs.

While it doesn't apply to the entire company, this product allows us to utilize automation through the API, which saves us a significant amount of time and eliminates manual changes that are error-prone.

We have been unaffected by major DDoS attacks because of the architecture.

This product has allowed us to reduce or eliminate DNS maintenance work. I can't estimate how much time this has saved us but being able to use an API versus manual maintenance means that we don't really have to do any maintenance. We've been given a solution that allows us to automate everything that we need to do.

The automation provided by NS1 means that we no longer have to focus on that work, which allows us to assign staff to other tasks. Time is saved because we don't really use manual processes with the DNS. We try to automate everything we do in the DevOps team, so this has been effective for us.

The most valuable features are the DNSSEC and the general reliability and speed of the service. We find that the low latency access to DNS queries has a direct effect on the customer experience. Visiting a site, whether it's an AdTech-based solution or marketing tech, the fact that whatever we're rendering on a page can be rendered better than the industry standard, in terms of time, ensures a better user experience.

The Application Telemetry feature is awesome. This includes latency detection and it allows us to detect where a customer may run into latency on the internet, giving us the opportunity to route around it. It contributes to providing the best user experience for our clients.

Using the Pulsar feature has certainly improved our user experience. Using Pulsar with telemetry monitoring between the customer and the endpoint, we are able to detect traffic and route it appropriately, which ensures the uptime of our applications and web properties. It also ensures that the lowest latency experience is possible.

We would really like them to become a DNS registrar.

I have been using NS1 Managed DNS for approximately seven years, since 2014, across companies.

I don't have any issues with stability.

Scalability-wise, I haven't had any issues with this product. It is being used wherever we're using DNS and as our business grows, it will be utilized more.

We have a DevOps team and an infrastructure team that uses NS1. The DevOps team mainly manages the automation of the cloud infrastructure and tools, whereas the infrastructure team manages our legacy on-premises data center.

This product provides the scalability we need to help meet SLAs and customers' demands without adding complexity, which is very important to us. Although it doesn't happen as often anymore, there can be significant changes in the demand for our service. This has the potential to overwhelm services, just like we see in denial of service attacks. However, the available capacity in NS1 has meant that we've never had a challenge with that.

I have worked with the customer success team and the experience was world-class. They're a customer-first team and they are always available. We reach out to them on Slack and they're always there for us. They're straightforward and transparent about any possible issues that they have on their side and overall, it's a wonderful experience.

The same is true for the product's technical support. They're always there for us and transparent about any challenges.

In the past, the company used Dyn, which is now by Oracle. I have also used UltraDNS.

There were several reasons that we switched. The number one reason is support and service, the second is the forward-thinking functionality and features, and the third reason is the cost.

At this company, the initial setup was very straightforward.

It was an import, and it was completed in a matter of hours or less.

Our implementation strategy was to import or migrate the zones from a previous NS1 account that was owned by another company, and then make the necessary registrar changes. During our migration, there was zero downtime.

I implemented NS1 Managed DNS at my current company. We completed the deployment in-house.

ROI is hard to quantify but in terms of application uptime and customer experience, we have seen a return on our investment.

The cost of this product is one of the reasons that we chose it.

There may be overage costs in addition to the standard licensing fees, although I haven't experienced them.

I looked at the Dyn and UltraDNS solutions. I also looked at Akamai Fast DNS and some of the cloud services. The two main reasons that we chose NS1 are the low-latency DNS, and a feature set that was unique and seemed to be beyond what anyone else was doing.

My advice for anyone who thinks that they don't need a solution like this because they have a free or basic DNS with their cloud provider is that they need to evaluate how DNS solutions may affect the customer experience. They should consider the global footprint of NS1, the network architecture, and where they implement Anycast. If these things don't matter then they're probably not running a business that relies on website revenue or has a website that represents their business.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is how easy it was to implement it, and that doing so probably reduces the risk of migrating to a new DNS solution.

This is a product that I have recommended to many different people. In general, I would say that this has been the easiest solution to manage and implement.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.