I recently migrated some domains to Hover, in part ‘cos I’d heard “good things” about them on the TWiT network. The first was my guinea-pig migration, and they flubbed it, but I was hopeful and I gave them another shot and the next one was smooth. Pretty soon after the migration was completed I wanted to improve website response performance by increasing the DNS TTL to allow caching. I was shocked to find Hover DNS doesn’t allow caches to improve performance by hard coding the TTL to 90 minutes which I feel is a bad idea, and nothing I’ve found (or been told by Hover) has convinced me otherwise. I feel that abusing DNS caches is a bad idea. I was thrilled, as you’ll see from the update, that somebody at Hover seemed to agree this needed changing, so I stuck with them.
When I was recently polled about my satisfaction by Hover I responded with great in many ways, and poor in this one. Below is the response I eventually received, which doesn’t seem like they understood the problem at all. Further, to me this reads as “we don’t plan on doing anything about this and unless others detect and complain about this we don’t plan on fixing it”. Frankly, although I might understand that from a business perspective I cannot admire it from a quality perspective. How hard would it be to have a simple UI, yet allow one small number to be controlled (say in some advanced settings area?) I want the DNS provider I am paying to be the expert in DNS and convince me they strive for the best solution, not solely the simplest.
I hope that whoever reads/writes @Hover has a better answer again, otherwise I am back to looking for another DNS provider.
Thanks for taking the time to provide your feedback in our recent survey.I’ve added your request for customized TTLs to our feature request backlog. I’m not able to give you an ETA or a firm answer as to whether or not we’ll be adding this feature. We find that many ISPs and DNS systems ignore the TTL and still fetch updates according to their own schedules. Even in cases where a domain owner sets all TTLs to the absolute minimum, the rest of the Internet doesn’t necessarily update their cache as frequently as indicted by the TTLs in the SOA record.In my experience, I’ve found that the only way to make absolutely sure there is no downtime when changing a domain’s name servers is to ensure the domain name’s zone file exists on both the old and new authoritative name servers for up to 72 hours.I realize that there are still cases where lowering the TTL is advantageous and this would give you more power and control over your DNS. If we continue to get more demand for this feature then we’ll be pushing it as a higher priority update.Don’t hesitate to reply if you have any other feedback that you’d like to share.