It’s been a few months now since Amazon Route 53 was released to the public. Some of you may have forgotten about it, while others are hesitant to change their DNS servers because there may not be much upside to it. Lucky for you, I couldn’t help myself and jumped on board within the first week of it being released. I have never experienced any DNS issues since the switch and from my untrained eye, things seemed to be more consistent. But what I really wanted was a reliable Amazon Route 53 benchmark to prove it.
Here is a DNS benchmark comparison of FantasySP.com provided by indeep76.com. Below you’ll see how much of an improvement Route 53 makes from various locations:
During the last 2-3 months using Amazon Route 53, the DNS lookups are more consistent and more reliable, not only from the USA, but all over the world. Depending on your current nameserver’s reliability, your results may vary. Use indeep76 to check or use a monitoring service like mon.itor.us or pingdom to give you a nice baseline. If you are getting anything close to 200ms + response times, then there is room for improvement. If you want to use Route 53 on your domain, then head over to dns30 and make sure to have your Amazon AWS API keys handy. It’s a simple setup and will make your site that much faster.
Sound like too much work for not enough payoff? Scared of changing nameservers and risking your site be unaccessible? I don’t blame you. However, I will say that if you are obsessed about page speed and have already optimized your site via gzip compression, minification, JS packing, and a CDN, then optimizing your DNS lookup time is your final step.