I have been a user and fan of DNSimple for several years. And I now have more than 20 domains managed using their services. Here are the main reasons why they are a game changer for me.
Easy to register a domain
You can register a new domain, in a few clicks, choosing from more than 200 top-level domains, as of this writing.
I also like the automatic renewal feature that you can choose when registering the domain. It makes things much more easy.
Furthermore, you receive an email notification about the automatic renewal, for each domain for which you chose that option, several weeks before the renewal date.
Easy to manage the records for your domain
Once you start using the service, the interface allows you to add your domains and do the DNS management operations in a few clicks. Of course, this depends on the plan you choose. Check the pricing plan page for more details, but basically you can start with the Personal plan and you get the first level service for up to 5 domains, for 5$ per month. Later, depending on your needs, you may want to upgrade.
How about an example to see how you associate a domain to a website you have published on a host?
This gives me the opportunity to talk about another great service I use for hosting static websites: Firebase Hosting.
Once I set a new static site on Firebase Hosting, in a few steps I can be up and running with the domain associated with the website.
It is dumb simple: The Firebase control panel for each hosted site shows you exactly the configuration details corresponding to each DNS record (A, CNAME, etc) you need to add in DNSimple. So you just have to keep both interfaces open and then copy the record information from Firebase and paste it in the right fields of the DNS record form provided by DNSimple for the domain management.
It is possible to delegate a domain's DNS management
If your domain is registered with another registrar, and you do not want or cannot transfer it yet, you can delegate its management to DNSimple.
The main step is going to the domain provider's management interface and changing the DNS servers parameter to point to DNSimple's servers. Check the DNSimple Support website to find the corresponding IP addresses.
Once the setup is active, you will be able to manage the DNS records for that domain as if it was registered with DNSimple.
It is possible to automate the operations
Now we can also do all the operations we do such as registering and managing domains and DNS records, automatically by using the programming interface. DNSimple provide a REST API, so we can use scripts to do the work for us. There are official library clients to the API for Ruby, Go, Elixir and Node.
And there are Python libraries such as this one that I am going to play with, in the near future, to test the API.
