We are looking at urgently deploying an outsourced DNS provider for a
critical domain which is currently unavailable but are having some
difficulty. I've tried contacting UltraDNS who only allow customers from US
/ Canada to sign up (we are in Malta) and their Sales dept are closed, and
Easy DNS who don't have .com.mt as an option in the dropdown for
transferring domain names (and also support is closed).
Black Lotus looks like the next best contender, has anyone had experience
with these or any other recommendations for how we can transfer a .com.mt to
a reliable hosting provider during the weekend?
Thanks everyone for the fast and offline responses! Black Lotus contacted me
directly (almost instantly) and helped me set up an account straight away so
I will give them a try.
We're using Afilias now, we had nothing short of a horrendous
experience dealing with Neustar / UltraDNS and their uninformed, blood
hungry sales team.
I would tend to agree... I have also used UltraDNS in the past for other
companies, however we needed them urgently and someone else responded faster
and they seem to be doing a good job so far.
I have used UltraDNS before. They are decent. I am however evaluating Dynect
(www.dyn.com) who are very popular with social media companies like Twitter.
I haven't used UltraDNS, but given some of their unsavory sales tactics,
I'm pretty biased against them. They spend awhile spamming people, and
calling up CTOs.
Working with a previous client about 1.5 years ago, we asked Dyn and
UltraDNS to send proposals over. UltraDNS was 3x the Dyn quote, and we were
satisfied from personal experience with Dyn before. When I explained to the
UltraDNS rep why we went with Dyn, they said "Oh, I thought you were looking
for an enterprise provide". Another vendor I don't plan on ever using (or
even considering) again.
Just throwing my hat in the ring. DNSmadeEasy has handled my DNS traffic,
  both personal and professional, for several years with an uptime of
  99.9999%* over 8 years of service (I've been with them for at least 4).
  Very honest, very responsive, great service, and very good pricing for an
  Enterprise Anycasted DNS network.
Beckman
* They were DDOSed recently with an enormous amount of traffic. First
outage in their 8 year history. www.dnsmadeeasy.com
Or maybe for some random company who doesn't have the burstable capacity to
handle a multi-gigabit network attack with a couple of office DNS servers.
Or maybe just a company who requires a guaranteed SLA... etc... Had we moved
to a free provider I have no doubt they would have gone down as well which
is not a very nice thing for us to do, so we moved to someone who could
shout at us and we could shout at.
It depends on the provider. Some are decently priced. Neustar /
UltraDNS is exponentially more expensive than their equally capable
competitors. I've seen they're pricing at $50 - 500 per 1M queries,
depending on how bad you are at negotiating. You'll need to spend at
least a few thousand per month to get below the $100 per 1M.
Pretty much everyone else is < $100 per 1M with much lower commits.
My major beef with Neustar, outside of stupid high pricing, is that
they changed the way all of their services were billed back in early
2009 and then arbitrarily applied the new overage calculations to
existing accounts, resulting in thousands of dollars in overage to the
account I had with them at the time. Their ethically questionable
sales staff used this as an opportunity to force an upgrade in order
to accommodate a "courtesy" fee waiver.
We're using Afilias now and the difference has been night and day.
