CDN provider EdgeCast Networks wants to get into the global DNS market and is doing so with the launch of a product called EdgeCast Route. The new DNS offering will rely on the company’s global IP infrastructure and will be priced at a fraction of what customers expect from existing enterprise DNS services, it believes.
Since 2006, EdgeCast has been building up its reputation in the content delivery business, taking on incumbents like Akamai. Along the way, it’s been gradually adding adjacent technologies as a way to provide a more competitive product portfolio and *ahem* upsell its existing customers.
That includes stuff like whole-site acceleration and dynamic site acceleration — and, most recently, the launch of a dedicated CDN just for e-commerce companies.
The launch of an enterprise DNS service follows along that trend — and, more importantly, it leverages technology that the company had built out for its CDN business. The new service is based DNS technology EdgeCast has been using internally to direct traffic for tens of thousands of EdgeCast servers around the world.
Big web properties rely on DNS providers to ensure that their online presence is available to end users, while providing protection against DDOS and other attacks. EdgeCast believes that it can provide all that and more, thanks to the infrastructure that it has built out.
EdgeCast Route relies on the company’s massive IP network, which has points of presence all over the world. In testing its own and third-party performance tests, the company believes that its product outperforms many of the major existing DNS providers by a factor of 15 percent to 300 percent, depending on the competitor and region. In fact, according to president James Segil, EdgeCast found that many of its customers were relying on the CDN to compensate for “a less-than-stellar DNS host.”
As a result, the company figured it was time to make the DNS service available to customers, and to do so with a pricing scheme that would be disruptive to the industry. Pricing will be based on the number of zones, queries, and DNS health checks that the service receives per month. It will also depend on what level of routing customers need — i.e. whether they’re looking for just standard DNS routing, or if they want load balancing and failover, or even more advanced policy-routing capabilities like geo-blocking.
Regardless of the setup, EdgeCast believes that it can save customers significant amounts of money over existing enterprise DNS customers. That means spending hundreds of dollars a month on DNS services as opposed to thousands or even tens of thousands, according to EdgeCast VP of product management Ted Middleton.
EdgeCast has raised $74 million in funding since being founded in 2006, including a big $54 million round it announced in July. Investors include Performance Equity Management, Menlo Ventures, and Steamboat Ventures.