We performed a comparison between Amazon Route 53 and IBM NS1 Connect based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Managed DNS solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The product's initial setup phase was very easy."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the DNS, routing, and traffic features."
"Amazon Route 53 is a DNS resolution service that helps you to map your hostname to another hostname."
"The feature for health check efficiently impacts the uptime and reliability of AWS servers including EC2 and EKS."
"The main DNS resolution is really, really fast."
"The initial setup is good and straightforward."
"Technical support from Amazon is very good...Overall, the product is stable."
"The scalability is the most valuable feature."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Everything we download into our observability platform so that we can also track any changes in traffic behavior or things like that is also something that we use quite a lot. I'd say traffic management, the speed of updates, and observability are the top three things that we use."
"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."
"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."
"There are no detailed logs, and they should implement that in the solution."
"The multiple routing policies present in the product have certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"Route 53 would be better if it had the ability to handle multiple requests at the same time because we have a lot of users. I would like that to be optimized in the next version."
"The product’s security and disaster recovery features need enhancement."
"When you add a new DNS record instructing the solution to map one thing to another, it has to propagate to all the networks, which takes some time."
"The solution’s pricing could be reduced."
"The solution should include more robust and secure services for hardening sites."
"Supporting DNS check is one feature missing in the solution."
"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."
"The Filter Chain simulation is really good in the UI, but it would be nice to have something similar in the API so that we could simulate and test things before we deploy them."
"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.""
"We would really like them to become a DNS registrar."
"I would love to see improvement in the testing capabilities they provide. They have a simulate-filter feature so that you can simulate how your traffic would flow, based on their Filter Chains. I believe that was shut off for quite some time. Having that as a way to test our load-balanced CDN structure would be fantastic."
"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."
"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."
"There could maybe be additional ways to manage traffic. There are no major improvements we're looking for. It's a very complete solution."
Amazon Route 53 is ranked 3rd in Managed DNS with 19 reviews while IBM NS1 Connect is ranked 7th in Managed DNS with 11 reviews. Amazon Route 53 is rated 8.6, while IBM NS1 Connect is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Amazon Route 53 writes "Provides clear documentation, easy to understand, simplifies management and efficiently handles our domain-related configurations and DNS records". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM NS1 Connect writes "Balances cost and functionality, speeds up provisioning, and reduces the DNS maintenance work drastically". Amazon Route 53 is most compared with Azure DNS, Cloudflare DNS, Google Cloud DNS, Cisco Umbrella and Neustar UltraDNS, whereas IBM NS1 Connect is most compared with Cloudflare DNS, Akamai Edge DNS, Neustar UltraDNS, Hurricane Electric Free DNS and Cisco Umbrella. See our Amazon Route 53 vs. IBM NS1 Connect report.
See our list of best Managed DNS vendors.
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