"The DNS hosting service typically thrown in for free by domain registrars is not very good. For most sites, solid DNS hosting costs about $USD 50 per year. It's worth the effort. Heck, set up with two different services for failover."

Can anyone recommend a company that provides solid DNS hosting? Are there measurable performance benefits? Thanks!

'It's hard to observe the DNS directly yet it exerts an obscure, pervasive influence without which everything would fly apart'

They're right, but a tip: dnstrace is brilliant for doing exactly that.

A minor irritant: using "the DNS" rather than merely "DNS" (but NOT in the title!). I find that somewhat distracting. Examples:

" It's hard to observe the DNS..."

"Using the DNS is often compared to..."

When should "the DNS" ("the domain name system") become "DNS"? Should it?

I'm currently reading: Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought". My apologies for unshouldering this heavy linguistic burden.

More like "A Web Developer's Guide to DNS". An engineer could just read about how DNS actually works. Further failure for using Javascript.