Best DNS Hosting Providers Compared and Reviewed by Crazy Egg

Of the nine DNS hosting solutions we researched and reviewed, ClouDNS is our favorite DNS hosting provider on the market today. It’s an affordable option with a wide range of DNS hosting plans to accommodate sites of all sizes—including a free forever plan—all backed by an unbeatable uptime SLA. Read on to use the research and reviews we provide in this post to find the best provider for you.

Top DNS Hosting Providers: Golden Eggs

Check out our Golden Eggs below, which are the DNS hosting providers we’ve found can rise to the challenge for most people’s needs:

ClouDNS offers fast and secure premium DNS hosting backed by service-level agreement for unfailing uptime. Start a 30-day free trial or sign up for the ClouDNS free forever plan today.

DNS Made Easy is a fully managed DNS hosting provider that’s perfect for bundling services for multiple domains into a single plan. Try it free for 30 days—no credit card required.

Namecheap has the most affordable DNS hosting services on the market, alongside a 100% uptime guarantee. Sign up now to get your first year for just $4.88.

Cloudflare DNS is an enterprise-grade DNS hosting solution that’s ultra-fast and offers unparalleled security. Contact their sales team for a quote today.

Crazy Egg's Golden Eggs: Top DNS hosting providers.

DNS Hosting Providers Review Process

All of the DNS hosting provider reviews below are organized by the most common buying scenarios we found when researching the category. By splitting our reviews into recognizable use cases, we’re able to highlight the providers that shine in that particular situation for needing DNS hosting.

For the nine DNS hosting providers reviewed in this guide, our research team identified three unique cases for buyers seeking DNS hosting services:

Securing unfailing uptime
Getting DNS hosting with traditional web hosting
Acquiring enterprise-grade authoritative DNS

Organizing these reviews by use case also makes it much easier for you to identify a DNS hosting provider that fits your needs. You can jump straight to the use case that best describes what you’re looking for and narrow your focus to the providers in that section with confidence.

Overall, this guide has everything you need to find the best DNS hosting provider for your website.

The Best DNS Hosting Providers for Unfailing Uptime

The Domain Name System (DNS) is how web browsers understand what site to load when someone types in a URL. Most of us never think about this unless it goes wrong and your site doesn’t appear shortly after someone types your domain into their browser. If you never want to run into this problem, that’s the main reason to consider standalone DNS hosting services. This ensures anyone who clicks a link to your site or enters your URL will always land on your site—without any timeout errors or recursive lookup issues. This is especially helpful if you purchased a domain from a domain registrar instead of your hosting provider.

ClouDNS

ClouDNS should be at the top of the list for anyone who wants fast and reliable DNS hosting at an affordable price. With a wide range of offerings, you can find the solution that meets your needs.

It starts with a free-forever DNS plan for sites with basic needs. It can handle up to 500,000 DNS queries each month, more than enough for many site owners. Plus, you still get 24/7 live chat support on this free plan if you need guidance or assistance.

Paid plans start at $2.95 per month for the Premium package, and it’s easy to justify the extra cost for the benefits you receive. Beyond just expanding the number of allowed requests per month (Premium allows for up to 5 million, the other paid plans are unlimited), you get double the DNS servers (eight, compared to the four on the free plan) and the ability to manage failover and monitoring checks. You also get free zone transfers and migration and a boatload of other advanced features.

ClouDNS has a 1,000% uptime SLA guarantee. Yes, you read that right—1,000%. This means that for every minute of downtime you might experience, they will extend your account by ten minutes. On top of that, you can test ClouDNS out on a 30-day free trial, minimizing the risk of using ClouDNS down to almost zero.

Namecheap

Namecheap is a top-rated domain registrar, but anyone can use Namecheap’s free DNS hosting service—even if you got your domain elsewhere. This is a great option for sites that can’t get a secondary DNS or a premium option beyond basic DNS from their domain registrar.

Beyond its free service, Namecheap has Premium DNS hosting that costs just $4.88 for your first year—which is an amazing value when you consider what you’re getting in return. This package allows up to 2 million site visits monthly and comes with a 100% uptime SLA, DDoS protection, DNSSEC zone signing, and more.

It’s worth noting that the service renews at $9.98 per year after the first-year promotional period expires. But that’s still very affordable when you compare it to other options on the market.

Refer to our Namecheap review to learn more about these services.

DNS Made Easy

DNS Made Easy is a fully managed DNS hosting service. This means that it’s going to be a bit more expensive than other providers, but you’re getting more bang for your buck, plus additional perks.

If you have multiple domains that you want to manage under a single account, this is the best option for you. The entry-level plan starts at $14.50 per month to manage five domains and allows for a whopping 5 million monthly queries. On top of that, you get two-factor authentication, 100% SLA-backed uptime, and DNS failover to ensure your site’s still accessible in the rare case of an outage or other downtime.

The other plans scale up from there in terms of monthly queries, the number of domains that can be managed (up to 50), additional logs, failover records, and other features. You also unlock the provider’s global traffic director, which allows you to control traffic flow based on visitors’ geographic location. You can also add additional domains to your subscription a la carte for just $1 per domain per month.

All plans are backed by DNS Made Easy’s outage-free guarantee with a 100% uptime commitment.

You can try DNS Made Easy for free with a 30-day trial that supports up to three domains, so you can use it to get a feel for how managing more than one works on this provider’s platform.

The Best DNS Hosting Providers for Traditional Web Hosting

Many website owners can just use the DNS offered directly through their web hosting provider. The quality of a provider’s nameservers directly relates to uptime, so look for web hosts that will back their promises of site uptime with an SLA guarantee. You should also prioritize web hosts that let you secure your domain directly through them.

A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting is best known for its ultra-fast web hosting services across the typical hosting types: shared, VPS, WordPress hosting, and dedicated hosting. With any web hosting plan, you can register a new domain through A2 for around $17.

And every single plan is backed by A2 Hosting’s 99.9% uptime commitment. If your site experiences more than 44 minutes of downtime during a month (not counting routine scheduled maintenance or negative conditions outside of A2’s control), you’ll receive a 5% credit of your monthly rate for every hour of downtime you experience.

You can also use A2 Hosting for domain registration and domain hosting. Every domain registered through A2 Hosting comes with free DNS management and is, again, backed by a 99.9% uptime commitment.

Overall, A2 Hosting is a great option for new websites that want to register a domain, get web hosting, and get DNS hosting under one roof or those who want to switch web hosting providers or DNS hosts. A2 offers free account migrations in both scenarios.

Check out our complete A2 Hosting review to learn everything that this provider has to offer.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy is another traditional web hosting provider with an extensive list of service offerings. From domain registration to online payment solutions and SSL certificates, GoDaddy has it all.

All shared hosting plans from GoDaddy come with free DNS management. If you sign up for either of their Ultimate or Maximum hosting plans, you’ll get GoDaddy’s upgraded Premium DNS included with your subscription.

One unique standout of GoDaddy is the ability to purchase Premium DNS hosting even if you purchased your domain elsewhere. This starts at $4.99 per month and allows you to manage an unlimited number of domains, making this quite the deal for standalone DNS. Though it lacks the iron-clad, 100% uptime guarantees of some other standalone DNS providers, you still get a 99.9% uptime SLA that will credit your bill if you encounter more than 0.1% downtime during a month.

Read our full GoDaddy review for more information.

Kinsta

Kinsta is a reputable web hosting provider that is best known for its managed WordPress hosting plans. It’s an excellent option for high-traffic business websites that want premium hosting services.

To be clear, Kinsta does not offer domain registration services. You can’t get a domain directly from them, but you can migrate an existing website to Kinsta and gain their high-quality DNS hosting when you switch. Every Kinsta customer automatically gets Amazon’s Route 53 premium DNS on their plan.

This is very easy to set up on your own in just a few clicks directly from your Kinsta dashboard, and it unlocks the faster lookup speeds of Amazon’s premium DNS.

Unless you’re an existing Kinsta customer, this option is only viable for those of you who are looking to switch web hosts. Otherwise, you need to look elsewhere for a standalone DNS hosting solution.

The Best DNS Hosting Providers for Enterprise-Grade Authoritative DNS

For businesses that can’t afford any website problems related to uptime, speed, or security, an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS is the way to go. These are more expensive than other options on the market, but the cost is well-justified if domain problems would ultimately lead to lost revenue or security problems that far outweigh the DNS’s cost. Sites that need deeper levels of security, customization, and monitoring will want an enterprise-grade DNS option.

Cloudflare DNS

For sites seeking superior performance, look no further than Cloudflare DNS. This enterprise-grade authoritative DNS provider offers unmatched redundancy and a 100% uptime guarantee. It brands itself as the fastest authoritative DNS in the world, with an average DNS lookup speed of 11ms globally.

If you think your company is at high risk of a DDoS attack, Cloudflare DNS has your back. As a managed DNS service, DDoS attacks get repelled at the DNS level. That’s why so many global enterprises rely on Cloudflare for DNS hosting, including IBM, Shopify, Zendesk, DoorDash, and LendingTree.

Cloudflare DNS makes it easy to configure your DNS records for more granular security control. For example, prevent malicious emails from being sent from your domain if your brand has a well-recognized name that could be attractive to fraudsters. That customizable security capability makes this service well worth the cost.

Cloudflare DNS makes it easy to switch if you already have a DNS hosting provider that you’ve outgrown or become unsatisfied with. You can even set up Cloudflare as your secondary DNS provider. Contact the Cloudflare sales team to get more information and pricing on a DNS hosting plan that’s right for you.

Neustar UltraDNS

Neustar Security Services has more than 25 years of experience with online security and a wide range of security solutions for large organizations, including enterprise-grade authoritative DNS services.

If domain security is your top priority, Neustar UltraDNS should definitely be on your radar. You’ll be put on a primary DNS network that runs on a proprietary application. That means no open-source vulnerabilities to worry about and an extra layer of protection against malicious activity. Paired with DNSSEC support, your domain will be less vulnerable to threats online than most others.

For those of you who can’t afford any downtime, you’ll be in good hands with a Neustar UltraDNS. You’ll also have access to advanced DNS traffic management services—perfect for any business with mission-critical web operations. Between the high performance, managed services, and top-rated security, you can’t really go wrong with Neustar Security.

NS1

NS1 has multiple enterprise-grade DNS solutions to choose from. They have managed DNS plans, dedicated DNS plans, and even managed DNS hosting specifically for China. Not only can you get rock-solid DNS hosting in general, but you can tap into that offering to maintain exceptional loading times within the “Great Firewall.”

You should also consider NS1 if you want to align your DNS with DevOps and NetOps. They provide API-driven solutions that can scale and adapt your DNS across various clouds, data centers, and CDNs—perfect for fast and secure DevOps environments.

Another cool feature of NS1 is the way your domain is provisioned. It’s both physically and logically separated from all other NS1 customers. So, you’ll never be impacted by any other sites that could be experiencing problems or attacks.

You can connect with an NS1 sales expert to go over plan options. They’ll help you get set up with the DNS hosting service that’s perfect for your needs.