Failover: DNS Made Easy vs Constellix

This has been a common question we’ve been seeing in our support system lately so we decided to record a demo of each service and explain the differences. We will start with a run down of the similarities and differences between the two services then demo how to setup each service.

First off, Constellix is a new service engineered by the DNS Made Easy engineers as a more advanced enterprise DNS management service. Constellix is built on network similar to DNS Made Easy’s, but they differ greatly in service offerings and configurability.

Similarities

Both providers’ failover services use IP Anycast networks which consisting of 16 geographically unique points of presence. When failover changes/updates are made, they are instantly propagated to nameservers at all 16 locations.

They also both offer email alerts when a Failover event occurs.

DNS Made Easy

DNS Made Easy’s failover service has a fifteen year history of keeping domains online guaranteed. Past studies have revealed that DNSME failover saved businesses an estimated $525 million in revenue in one quarter alone.

Technical Specs:

• Only available for A records
• 4 monitoring locations
• 2–4 minute monitoring intervals
• Downed IP addresses are verified by multiple locations before failover events occur
• Will not monitor 2nd or 3rd IP addresses until the 1st is verified as down

Pricing

Included in Business and Corporate memberships. Additional checks can be purchased for $4.95 / year.

Constellix

Constellix offers a similar failover service but with more advanced monitoring features.

Technical Specs:

• Available for: A, AAAA, ANAME, and CNAME records
• Choose which locations you want to monitor from. Maximum of 14 locations.
• 30 second to one day monitoring intervals
• Detailed logging with historical comparison
• Traceroute and visual traceroute in notification report
• Advanced check verification
• All IP’s are monitoring all the time

When an IP or FQDN is reported as down by one location, Constellix will check the next closest location. If both report the endpoint as down, a failover event will occur. Alternatively, you can choose to require a majority of all locations to report the endpoint as down before triggering failover.

Pricing

Usage-based. Rather than charging per failover event, Constellix only charges per million of queries.

Demo

Originally published at DNS Made Easy Blog.