I’m a huge fan of DNS Made Easy and Zerigo, so I wasn’t terribly impressed when Amazon announced Route 53. While it did fill a hole in their cloud infrastructure offerings and DNS is certainly not something to neglect, it’s also one of the most basic elements of networking - one of those elements that isn’t exciting, that just works… or doesn’t.

One thing I hadn’t thought about, though, is the TLD used for hosting my DNS. More specifically, that there should be more than one. The Route 53 documentation includes a sample response that shows the DNS servers to use for your domain. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the servers all use different TLDs: COM, NET, ORG, and CO.UK.

We’ve all heard different stories of how massive outages happen - whether accidentally or intentionally. The US Government could seize the wrong domain and wipe out an entire hosting company, there could be a large issue at Verisign (which hosts both the COM and NET zones, among others), or some other country could suddenly route half the internet through their pipes. The point is that, however unlikely, things do happen and it’s best not to have all your eggs in one zone file basket.

Amazon’s approach of using individually-numbered domains (like awsdns-11.net) and different TLDs should definitely help combat several of those gaps. At the very least it’s gotten me thinking about paying the relative premium (as high-quality low-cost DNS goes) to use Route 53 for a couple domains.