We all know when you buy a domain name the registrar often provides a complimentary DNS service for you to use. Gee thanks you might think. Turns out they’re almost all half-arsed and generally a bit shit.

Lets take 123-reg.co.uk and easily.co.uk as examples. You buy a domain, you get free DNS with it, awesome potatoes. You go ahead and add some A and CNAME records, wait the half hour it takes their antiquated system to propagate the changes and all good, seems to work.

Now, once you’ve had a slice of Pizza and got over the fact they only offer two nameservers for you to use (which are probably two servers 1U above each other in the rack, sharing the same kettle lead from the run-down kitchen) you want to delegate a sub-domain to a different set of nameservers.

Aha that’s easy! Just add a couple of ‘NS’ record types you might be thinking. Let’s try that.

123-reg.co.uk:

easily.co.uk:

Register.com’s options are exactly the same and no doubt countless others.

Wait, what? You’ve got to be shitting me – NS record you say, no no no.

What’s worse is it’s not just a UI limitation – their support staff even claim this is not possible. You  mean to say you can’t replace the letters ‘MX’ to ‘NS’ and make it possible to add a record.

Since when was it acceptable to offer half arsed DNS, even as a comp service? If you can’t even provide a DNS service with all the records from the RFC (1035 section 3.2.2) then how can I trust you can do anything else properly?

If you do buy a domain name do yourself a favour and get a real DNS provider. My favourite free solution is HE.net who not only offer free DNS (including dynamic) but also IPv6 training. For the enterprise solutions we have the big boys such as UltraDNS and DNSMadeEasy.com.  Others like cloudflare.com are possibly also worth checking out.