It always surprizes me that large domains don't configure common mistypes of their subdomains in their DNS. For instance
w.microsoft.com
ww.microsoft.com
wwww.microsoft.com
For that website it only works as http://www.microsoft.com, or http://microsoft.com. It seems logical that they should add the common derivatives in, point them to a multi-host-header site that does nothing but redirect to http://www.microsoft.com, and voila - A lot of sloppy-typing users save a bit of time and avoid a bit of frustration.
Microsoft actually makes use of a lot of their subdomains (e.g.
research.microsoft.com, msdn.microsoft.com), however for smaller
sites it could simply be a wildcard entry. Even if there are lots
of subdomains, the redirect logic could do some analysis of the
typed in entry and figure out the likely destination. e.g.
madn.microsoft.com probably wanted msdn.microsoft.com, and
resrch.microsoft.com probably wanted research.microsoft.com.
Of course yafla.com isn't configured like that - I don't control
the DNS in this case so I didn't have the option.
http://www.nettica.com/Domain/Dns.aspx
its very nice and its very cheap ($10 per year). I looked into a number of DNS providers and it was the best I found. Updates are instant and the UI works well.
Hosting DNS outside of your webhost is just a insurance policy. If you webhost suddenly goes down for some reason you can quickly redirect your site somewhere else, even if it is just an out of service page.
In my opinion all sites should have a wildcard that leads to *SOMETHING* even if it's just a search box.
As per the above comment, I too have a separate DNS server to my hosting company... if my host goes down or disconnects me I can switch it 'instantly' to my own home server.
The second entry on the Notables section on the right has a weird typo!
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Dennis Forbes is a Toronto-based software architect. While focused primarily on the .NET and SQL Server worlds, Dennis frequently ventures outside of this comfort zone into game development and image processing. He has been published in several industry magazines, has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and has been interviewed by NPR.He is a vice president and lead software architect at an innovative New York City hedge fund back-office services firm.
Dennis has been working on solutions for the financial, telecommunications, and power generation markets for over 15 years.