(I wrap around route53 at http://dns-api.com/ and don't yet support any kind of GeoDNS, or health-checks. They're not things users seem to want.)
rage4 > About triple Amazon's price [Euros > USD]
I'm uncertain why you feel they are competitive given Route 53's level of stability and the fact both of these services cost more [one considerably more if you only have 2 million DNS lookups / month]?
For larger projects then I'd rather host my own anyway, as I want pretty complex rules for handling queries from different regions, failover, number of IPs to return, and so on. We do exactly that with gdnsd and handle about 450m DNS queries per month.
The reason Route53 excited me is it has failover, healthchecks, etc. built in in a way I can sleep through things failing without anything breaking.
I don't actually use 2 million DNS queries / month, yet. But if I implemented DNS-based failover and shortened the TTL from the 12 hours I have now to something like 5 minutes? Ya, that'd clear 2 million pretty quickly. ;)
At 2M queries/mo our list pricing is $8 (https://nsone.net/support/billing/). Indeed our Biz Plan is $200 -- but that includes 24/7 support, 25M queries, and other bells & whistles. If you just need a little more volume, stick with the startup plan.
That said, indeed, in general we're more expensive than R53, Rage4, and various others, because of the depth of capabilities of the platform and the quality of the support we provide. But we're also pretty unique in giving away 1M queries free with no feature locking, so our most advanced stuff is available to everyone. If you're just after basic geo-routing at the lowest cost, we're happy to help but you may find other services cheaper; but if you intend to go beyond geo to complex failover arrangements, load shedding, weighting/stickiness, network-based fencing, etc, then do some tinkering with NSONE and let us know what you think. Feedback is always good. :)
If I was trying to make a living at it, I'd seriously consider you even at $200/month.
The reason for my joy at the R53 news is the fact that w/o Geo it'd be worthless to me.