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ZoneEdit
Acquired by EasyDNS, Zoneedit is a managed DNS provider that offers various service level agreements which you can decide on. They primarily have servers in the US and they offer a variety of add on services. They currently manage around 600,000 domains and they have 5 node locations; New York, DC, Texas, California, and Germany. Their network is not running IP anycast and their resolver code is BIND. They provide an interface to manage your domains and they support all record types. There is no phone support and its not entirely 24x7x365. They provide various SLA’s based upon how many servers you sign up for.
Additional Services:
- Email Forwarding
- URL Forwarding
- Dynamic DNS
- Email Recovery
- Failover
- Load Balancing
- Reverse DNS
- Domain parking
Pricing:
You purchase “zone credits”
Free – first 5 domains added with under 200MB usage each
$10.95 – 1 zone credit
$49.95 – 10 zone credits
$99.95 – 25 zone credits
$349.95 – 100 zone credits
All of these include unlimited records per domain.
Every time 1 year or 200MB of usage is used (1 million DNS queries), 1 debit is added to your account for the zone
If you add extra (third, fourth) of their name servers it will cost an extra ‘zone credit’ (1) per year
Failover monitor service costs an extra ‘zone credit’ (1) per year
Backup mail service also costs an extra ‘zone credit’ (1) per year
*FREE accounts are ones where the usage is less than 200MB per domain, and there have been fewer than 5 domains added to the account, and no premium services have been used.
Further Information:
The average failure detection time on their failover service is 10 minutes, which varies depending on the situation. Recovery times average around 5 minutes.
Mail backup service will store mail up to 10 days.
Feedback has shown their interface to be very unattractive.
The lowest TTL you can set is 20 minutes and you cannot set them individually.
Based on trace route tests, it seems as though they have more node locations than what their website says; ie. New Zealand, New Jersey and Wisconsin.
They have not updated their website since 2002.
They have one known outage back in November 2006.
More information at www.zoneedit.com
On November 12, 2012 Bandit wrote:
I have used ZoneEdit for perhaps ten years. Until approximately 4-6 weeks ago things were very solid and I had no complaints. For the last 4-6 weeks my domain is unresolvable as much as it is resolvable. I have made 4 support inquiries.
I received 2 replies, one saying it was due to a DoS attack and it had been largely resolved, the other saying my ticket was a duplicate. These replies were their first and only responses and arrived approximately 10-14 days after my support request.
The issue has remained unchanged. I’ve stuck around this long because I had been so happy with them for so long, now I am shopping for another DNS host. My tolerance partly stems from using the service for a hobby domain but it is too frustrating even for that.
Very disappointing as I had commonly referred them and now feel badly for doing so.
On November 16, 2012 Peter wrote:
I’ve been using ZoneEdit for many years, but the last couple of months things seems to be going in the wrong direction. Webforward is horribly slow, European DNS server goes down regularly, old A records reappear even though web GUI displays correct records… When asking support for an explanation they respond with a standard message: “We are not allowed to publicly share details of any outages on any part of our services as this could lead to possible security vulnerabilities.”
and simply close the issue, as if nothing happened at all…
I will look for a more professional (and yes probably more expensive) solution…
On November 19, 2012 Philip Isaac wrote:
I just enrolled and bought 12 credits today. I wish I had read this first. I already was not able to get anything to work. I am not super DNS savvy so just needed to be pointed to a tutorial or something but their answer was;
” is a slave zone, it will do whatever the master zone is configured to do.If the master is not properly configured, it will not work.”
duh!
On December 12, 2012 Creo wrote:
Avoid ZoneEdit at all cost!
their name servers started to serve old (out of date) records, causing days of outage due to wrong nameserver caches all around the world for our customers. Happened a few weeks ago.
Support replied 3 days (!!!) later that everything seems to be fine again – without stating WHAT happened or THAT anything happened at all.
Support reponse times are bad,
no phone support ( you’re taking money for this, guys! ),
short and worthless answers that take no responsibility at all,
credits are not charged back if you leave,
Being a customer for several years now, I can’t bear with this situation any more and leave for a professional provider.
On January 14, 2013 Pin wrote:
We use Zoneedit for almost 8 years. This are the feedback:
1. Very bad support.
2. DNS down sometimes and no notice are sent out.
3. Terminate their reseller account and do not want to refund unused credits.
Overall, please do not use Zoneedit. They run it really no professional. They are a very not reliable company and I strongly suggest those other reseller suffering the same issues do contact me and we can sue this company.
On January 21, 2013 Peter wrote:
We have moved to Amazon Route 53 DNS servers after many problems with ZoneEdit, as reported previously on November the 16th, 2012.
On January 29, 2013 Jim Rigsby wrote:
Almost SEVEN days and not a peep out of ZoneEdit support. My web site is still up, not that that matters since it is just a “coming soon” page but out of the blue all of my email forwarding for my rigsby.ca and prestigeprint.ca has stopped! This SUCKS! I know that Zoneedit doesn’t have any guarantees for the mail forwarding service but I’m rethinking the whole thing. I have unused credits and I’m willing to invest in more if they would just FIX THE DAMN THING!
My view? As much as I’ve had no trouble with Zoneedit up to this point, because of this TOTAL lack of support I would not recommend ANYONE use them.
On January 29, 2013 Alan wrote:
After years of mostly very good service, my main Mail Forward has stopped working about half the time. I know for a fact I’m missing email. I have no idea why the main one out of about 20 Mail Forwards should become flaky, but it has and I’ve had no response to support emails for three days, and as we know there’s no hope for phone contact. It seems to be a matter of which mail server handles the mail flow: mail5.zoneedit.com vs mail7.zoneedit.com vs ? In any case, I’m not very good at DNS and it sux to have to move but I’ve had it. Looking for a free, reliable alternative for a very low-demand domain, just 20 or so Mail Forwards and an MX record.
On March 1, 2013 CS wrote:
These people have just cut off all service to my business website (including email of course).
This was done without warning and it is solely their responsibility because they have failed to process a paypal payment done a month in advance!
They are not responding to email support and they have no telephone number. I am sitting on my hands waiting for the change to another DNS service to propagate.
Avoid them like the plague!
On March 3, 2013 Stan Berry wrote:
I know that Dynamic DNS for my small web site is no big deal, but I paid for the name through 2015 and Zoneedit’s records indicate the renewal date is 11 March 2013 … I have my receipts from their Domain.com. Repeated requests for help go unanswered. I’d recommend against using Zoneedit.
On March 18, 2013 EB wrote:
Last year, after years of reliable service (and for free) I had to pay for managing my domain, which I did. Everything worked fine till a couple of weeks ago.
I had to pay for renewal. I really tried several times to pay with my credit card, but the payment was not accepted. Got strange errors. After sending a few mails to ZoneEdit I gave up. Never got any reply or help.
I decided to move away from ZoneEdit.
On March 27, 2013 Gulom Azizkhujaev wrote:
I did start to use Zoneedit after recommendation from habrahabr.ru community. But now I understand, that it was bad idea.
I did try to make payment, totally for sum $180. But money not appeared on my profile balance, but from my payment card withdrawed.
Never use Zoneedit! They are not Professional, only deletants
On April 9, 2013 Bob wrote:
I had been using ZoneEdit for at least 10 years with few problems. However, things have changed. I updated by email forward. A couple days later, some email was still being directed to my old account. I contacted ZoneEdit but go no response. This continued for days. I contacted them once each day, but never got a response. Finally, I moved all my stuff to someone else. Judging from previous comments, it may be possible that all of the employees have left and all that is there now is a server running unattended. In any case, don’t expect much if you go with them. Also, they appear to have eliminated their free service, at least for new customers.
On April 10, 2013 Franziska wrote:
I’ve started to open one ticket a month last year, optimisticly hoping to get one day a reply. The mailforwarding was completely unreliable. I then got an answer on my ticket after 30 days:
“We want to first apologize for the delay in getting back to you on your inquiry. We are working diligently to get a timely response to all of our customers and this time we failed. We deeply apologize for that.
In order to assist with this issue we need to know if you are still experiencing issues with the email forwarding. I will leave this case open and in my care waiting for your reply.”
This is again more than 30 days ago. They seem to wait so hard for my answer that they were unable to move a finger to solve my problem (which is aparently a very well know one). I’m speechless, and obviously I’ve moved everything to a decend provider.
On May 16, 2013 Andrew Watts wrote:
Zoneedit was a great service up to about a year ago.. forwarding doesn’t work. Any new forwards do not work, I have asked repeatedly for help on their support.. No response (3 recent attempts in the last couple of months) .. I have had enough and am actively looking for a replacement service. In short if you want forwarding avoid like the plague.
On May 23, 2013 Paul Mead wrote:
Have used Zoneedit for many years and been happy with the service with no issues; but recently had an issue where one of the two DNS servers was out of action for a zone and the 2nd dns server was serving incorrect (out of date?) records; thereby having a random effect of causing email to be rerouted by backup mx mail server and then at some random time actually going through. It took about 31 hours for a response from zoneedit; by which time I had started to migrate the zone in question, shortly followed by all others. Email only support is ok if the response is prompt; otherwise no dice. Shame. They need to charge a little more and provide a better service.
On June 5, 2013 Alexander wrote:
I am yet another longtime ZoneEdit user who is finally getting fed up with them. As others have said, they used to be good up to a few years ago. Then they “upgraded” the user interface with a new one which sucks terribly, they servers became unreliable (often unreachable or slow or not synched), and they stopped responding to emails. About a year ago I had some issues and emailed them repeatedly, got no response for weeks; then one day I got “case closed” notifications from them — without ever having received any actual response to my support requests. AVOID, AVOID, AVOID.
On June 9, 2013 rukpat wrote:
Getting “relay access denied”
The problem is with domain SPF record, See my post here:
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=2039830&p=-1&#bottom
On June 10, 2013 Steve wrote:
Had been getting “relay access denied” errors since Friday. It got progressively worse, without ANY response from support. After three days and multiple tickets, I finally switched service providers. Then within 30 minutes, Zoneedit closed all of my tickets. Horrible. It’s like the company is going belly-up and they’re taking us down with them.
On June 14, 2013 bernie wrote:
Ive been trawling the net trying to work out why I have been getting reports from associates saying they cant contact me by email “relay access denied” – Being using Zone eddit mailforward for about 10 years just like every one else. things had been going just great untill about 6 months ago.
If the problem is with the SPF record why did it become a serious problem just recently?
On July 16, 2013 Unhappy wrote:
My websites have been up and down a few times in the last 30 days due to DNS issues at Zoneedit. They have eventually replied to support requests stating they are aware there is a problem and they are working on it. Service is extremely unreliable of late, I have since moved my records elsewhere.
I have outstanding credits they claim they can’t refund. I’ll be reporting them to the Better Business Bureau.
I recommend avoiding Zoneedit.com
On September 10, 2013 Jon wrote:
Same story as many others have reported. I’ve been with them for 10 years but the MailForward is completely broken all of the sudden.
Support request tickets go unanswered. I guess I’ll need to go shop around for another provider.
On September 11, 2013 slaw wrote:
We have been a paid customer of ZE for ~5 years.
This week we experienced a massive downtime because ZE servers started resolving our names with an obsolete, year-old IP configuration, all on their own. ZE eventually called us and confirmed they had a major, all-across systems failure. Our guess is that they applied some old backups to restore the service, rendering our sites down.
Their Twitter page is useless — no service-status updates.
We moved to another provider and added DNSSEC. Left quite a few “ZE credits” behind.
On November 22, 2013 Paul wrote:
This service must be run by amateurs.
They can’t keep track of their own customers correctly, emailing the wrong people regarding domain ownership.
Zone transfers are wide open, allowed to anyone and everyone.
Avoid these clowns and use a real DNS provider.
On April 2, 2014 Mike wrote:
Zoneedit was a decent service roughly 6 years ago. I’m going to agree with the masses here that their support response time is pathetic! One support request took them two weeks to get to, and I as probably many of you are were paying customers. I say were because most of you Zoneedit’s ship has sailed. Some other company will take mine and all my customers money now for DNS services.
On April 8, 2014 Phillip wrote:
There are a couple of mentions of Zoneedit allowing zone transfers. You can configure the allow-transfers field on the advanced page to disable this.
On April 26, 2014 David wrote:
I’ve used ZoneEdit for many years with no problems until a month ago. I use mail forwarding on one of my domains and, a month ago, changed the details. Mail6.zoneedit.com updated the information correctly, mail7 did not. Thus I have only a 50% chance of getting mail delivered. I complained and received “engineers are investigating”. After a week with nothing happening, I wrote again. This was treated as a new complaint which was immediately cancelled because the first complaint was still open. Lastly, their website is so slow that it’s virtually impossible to make any more changes. What a disappointment for an organisation which was once so good.
On May 4, 2014 Luciano Patrao wrote:
I am using Zoneedit for 11 years. Since the day one I am a paying costumer.
But in the last 2/3 years everything is getting worse. I am tired of checking the Zones(DNS problems, email not being delivered), send emails to support. That take days just for a simple reply and then they just close the ticket after the first reply without the change of reply back.
Enough is enough, I will start to look for alternatives to this service.
This was the best DNS service in the Internet, but now?? Shity service.
On June 2, 2014 Karl C wrote:
I have been a long-time ZoneEdit customer as well (over a decade). They have always been a “no frills” provider, which suited me just fine. I don’t need super-fancy interfaces – I just want something that (1) works, and (2) I have (almost) complete control over.
Unfortunately, they’ve failed.
Both DNS servers that my sites are hosted on are down, and have been for 5 days now. And, all of my attempts to contact ‘support’ at ZoneEdit have been ignored (emails, phone calls, voicemails, support tickets). Not even an acknowledgment that they are aware of the problem and working on it.
So, my sites were down for days, until I finally gave up and switched to another (free!) DNS hosting provider.
If anyone is interested in buying the 4964 credits that I have with ZoneEdit, let me know. I’ll never use them now…
On June 11, 2014 Jacko wrote:
Pathetic. Pathetic in every way possible. Avoid like the plague.
On July 10, 2014 Mark J wrote:
I echo the last two reviews, absolutely terrible service. I too experienced that 5-7 day outage last month and received no communication whatsoever from ZoneEdit customer service. They didn’t even acknowledge a week long outage that took out connectivity to all of my mail and web servers since no one could look them up. It took me two days to get company email working again thanks to long Time To Live (TTL) settings & some DNS servers flushing cached entries slowly. I had been with them for over a decade but never again, I have moved on and won’t go back. That was the second major week long outage I experienced with them and yet not a single word of why it happened or a root cause. I would look elsewhere for a reliable provider.
On July 31, 2014 Chloe wrote:
I have been using zoneedit for years. The service haste been definitely reliable. I really like that they gave me my first three zones for free – of course, it’s the first three that you register and can’t be replaced.
Customer service? Absolutely the “best”
I believe their version goes like this:
We have a FAQ list, if we feel that your answer resides there, we won’t respond to you because we already did … through the FAQs. So, it isn’t that their customer service is bad, it’s so efficient that they’ve already helped you…but you’ll never know it.
On August 11, 2014 Christoph wrote:
Me too I am a long time customer. As I do not need services which need paiment/credits, I offered several times to pay for the free services – no way, is not possible. I bought credits which I could not apply to a service because the ones I use are free (those credits disapear and are lost after a while, which is ok for me, as I’m really willing to pay for what zoneedit does for me).
But since March or April 2014, their services are down or not reliable any more: DDNS updates sometimes work, sometimes not, same with e-mail forwarding.
Each time I opened a ticket, they either answered that they have problems and are working on them, or they told me to look for another company…
It is a shame, zoneedit offered such a good service before.
The only good thing is that for a few months now it is not possible to register a new account with zoneedit any more, so nobody can get trapped.
On March 2, 2015 Jack wrote:
This page is now horribly outdated, since somewhere in the second half of 2014 ZoneEdit was acquired by easyDNS, just when I was about to jump ship after having been a customer for ten years. I decided to see how things would turn out, and am enjoying a fast website/control panel, everything working as it’s supposed to again and fast and reliable support. Yes, it sucked hard BEFORE, but after easyDNS take over ZoneEdit now ROCKS again! Also see easyDNS reviews on this site, they have quite good ratings.
On August 26, 2015 Hal wrote:
I’d been a (free) customer of ZoneEdit for years and found their service to be pretty good – far more reliable than other free DNS services out there.
Ever since the easyDNS takeover, however, I’ve had nothing but trouble logging in to manage my zones. About half the time the “Log In” link just does not work (connection times out). The other half I’m able to successfully log in and view my zones, but when I try to make a change, the website times out and then no further actions are possible – and if I go back to the home page and click the “Log In” link again, I find that the link is now broken (even if I go to another computer on another network, the link is still down – it’s not related to a resource or configuration problem on my computer).
The above behavior has been seen consistently for quite a while; I’d say since the start of 2015 at least.
I’ve filed multiple support requests with ZoneEdit Support – the closest I got to an actual response was an automatic message declaring my request to be closed.
Fortunately, I only use this service for my vanity domains, and while I cannot make changes, the DNS services continue to respond. But I would certainly not recommend ZoneEdit any more based on their non-responsive “Support” department alone.