Google Cloud DNS Pros and Cons: Do Website Owners Need to Self-Host DNS?

Recently I saw a website owner using the Cloud DNS service under Google Cloud Platform (GCP for short), which made me very curious about why he would specifically set up and manage DNS himself, since aside from the satisfaction, the pros of doing it yourself do not necessarily outweigh the cons.

The service DNS provides is the so-called domain name server, responsible for resolving how domain names and network addresses correspond to each other. It is managed built-in by commercial network service providers (such as GoDaddy and NameCheap), or you can choose to set up your own DNS domain name server.

Generally speaking, only large enterprises or academic institutions need to self-host DNS domain name resolution servers when building basic network infrastructure. Although this raises operating costs—for example, DNS DDoS attacks require special handling to avoid network collapse, which would cause website failures and 404 errors and lead to search engines downgrading the site—self-hosting is more convenient for management and can pursue the highest specifications, performance, stability, and security according to needs (such as for million-scale websites).

But do ordinary website owners need to self-host a DNS name server?

The answer is no.

In the past, setting up DNS required at least two computers, each with its own independent network address (Internet protocol address, or IP address), and their function was only to simply resolve domain names, and they could not be used to set up and manage web servers or databases. Not to mention you would also have to worry about being hijacked by hackers and having your entire enterprise’s network services held hostage. Does this not sound a bit absurd? Still, self-hosting DNS does have its necessity for large network systems.

Thus Cloud DNS later appeared, which moves all the needed hardware and network environment to the cloud. We only need to configure settings in the Cloud DNS service, which can greatly reduce costs, and it has scalability and complies with world-class security standards. Although getting started is much simpler, the same problem still exists: why set up DNS yourself?

Looking at the built-in DNS server of GoDaddy, which many people use, its continuous uptime [1] can reach 99.98%, but that also means 0.02% of the time it is not operating normally. NameCheap is only 99.9%, meaning 0.6 seconds of error every 60 seconds.

Even Cloudflare, globally renowned for its content delivery network (CDN) focused on reverse proxying, has a DNS uptime of only 99.99% (which is considered very high).

Although this seems like an extremely tiny error rate, once it reaches global scale, for a large website with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of users online, that error rate is magnified even more. So for large enterprises, what they need is a 100% stable environment.

Besides spending heavily internally on hardware resources and talent, GCP Cloud DNS (or high-end name server services like Amazon’s AWS Route 53), which claims to have a high SLA, has become the first choice for many network engineers and startup teams when developing networks.

A “Service Level Agreement” (SLA) is a formal commitment that can be defined between a service provider and a customer. It is a standard practice for the service provider and the served user to reach a committed service metric—quality, availability, responsibility—providing users with a quick way to evaluate suppliers.

Calculation method: Service level = uptime (hours) / a certain period (month/year) * 100%.

However, some website owners may think Google or Amazon can provide a 100% SLA. This is actually a misunderstanding; the correct statement is that if a 100% SLA is not reached, you can apply for compensation. Even the mighty Google Cloud Platform’s continuous uptime actually only reaches 99.91%.

From this we can see that if you cannot self-host a DNS name server, at least there is the inexpensive, flexible, and secure Cloud DNS to choose from. But why did the author earlier say there is no need to self-host a DNS name server, nor to use Cloud DNS?

Because for ordinary website owners, it is simply unnecessary.

A very common argument is that a DNS service provider being attacked or having a hardware failure would seriously affect website business. Well, if such large service providers cannot protect themselves, how would you think self-hosting would be safe?

Even if you use Cloud DNS to pursue the best quality, scalability, and security, in reality both Google Cloud DNS and Amazon’s AWS Route 53 are just larger service providers (and not even more established than other veteran professionals), and they too can be attacked and crash or have bug failures.

So the simplest way is to find a domain name registration service provider (such as GoDaddy or NameCheap) and use their default DNS name server for domain addressing. As for the 0.01% host offline status, just treat it as a test of your luck.

References

1. DNS Performance Analytics and Comparison.
2. Cloud …