CLOUD score - Godaddy versus Dyn

We recently reviewed both DynECT Managed DNS and GoDaddy DNS and our analysis shows Dyn to be a better fit for us. Both scored well, GoDaddy with a 73 and Dyn with an 81. Either would be a good choice.

Both offer reliable service, yes even though GoDaddy had an outage recently, they are still reliable. Both have multiple data centers globally, though Dyn has more and in more areas too, IE South America. If you are global that matters. If you are US or US. EMEA, APAC only it may not be a big deal.

Contract wise they are comparable, which means there are things in both we don't like. The GoDaddy SLA was actually better. If they miss their 99.999% goal then you get 2 months free. (If you got a 2 month free from the last outage we would love to hear it, always good to confirm)

Where Dyn really excels is on the relationship. GoDaddy really seems to focus on the smaller shops and expects you to do most of the shopping online with a credit card. Dyn has an account team that can talk to you, explain their products and provide that advice and, well relationship that I think is important.

GoDaddy though is cheaper, has the better SLA and better support hours, though I felt that their support, at least when I tested it, was a little less technical than Dyn. I asked about backing up my DNS records and GoDaddy suggested taking a screen shot, even though they have an option to export. Not a wrong answer, but if I had a lot of records it could be many screen shots and manually having to enter them would not be fun.

GoDaddy also offer more services. I can do web hosting, email hosting and even get them to help with my web design. We didn't look at those services, but there is something to be said for having your hosting and your registration be the same company.

Both Dyn and GoDaddy reserve the right to terminate you at any time. There were at least a few complaints about GoDaddy doing that to protect against fraud, which is good, but getting things turned back on seemed painful. That makes sense since there is no account team to help.

In summary, if company relationship and personal support is important to you for DNS, stick with Dyn.

If you want cheap and easy and are looking to host a website as well, GoDaddy can be a good option.

AWS stands alone

CIO recently ran an article about Amazon Web Services and the fact that Gartner claims they are pretty much well ahead of the pack in the leadership space of IaaS. This is not that surprising, I mean Amazon was one of the first to offer cloud computing first with EC2 (elastic computing) and S3 (Storage) and now with AWS. When you help to define a market, being seen as the leader of it is really yours to lose.

We are actually just starting to use Amazon for Infrastructure, though we have used a lot of SaaS vendors, like Salesforce.com, Okta and Google. In fact the event that made the change a priority for us was a data center move. The move will take us 46 hours (according to the plan) and being without our primary web site for that long wasn't a real popular thought, so we moved it to AWS. 

We chose them because it was so easy. Setting an account up is easy, adding machines is a snap and when we decided this morning we really needed a SQL database to go along with it for some of our applications, it took minutes to provision that too. It's cheap, especially for short term needs like this, and can easily fit on a credit card and be expensed to the company. Many people underestimate how important that is, but that ability to work within financial guidelines is a big deal.

We will find out this weekend how it works, but so far I'm impressed. 

Scorethecloud - Cloud consulting company of the year Finalist

Thanks to everyone that voted for us for the "Best cloud consulting 2012" from UP 2012. We made it to the finalist round which was a great accomplishment for such a new company!

Everyone always says it is an honor to be nominated and we agree. Making it to the final round is pretty great too!

In 2013 we will get our application live so everyone can score their cloud vendors and get useful data from the global cloud user base. We also hope to upgrade our website and get even more social. 

Stay tuned!