The problem

Many of us have registered domain names at Moniker.com. And while they are both effective and efficient at registering and managing your domain names for a low "bulk" price, their DNS servers have proven to be utterly unreliable with several day long outtages over the last year.

This means your domains are all good and safe but if you use Moniker's own DNS servers (instead of, for example, your web hosting company's name servers), people may experience additional delay in trying to access your site or they may even not get there at all.

One solution would be to use your web hosting's provider's DNS servers. But these tend to not be very reliable either... and to say the least, they are very slow.

The Solution

So we went out to look for a dedicated DNS service provider. There are many but only a handful use AnyCast. AnyCast allows your visitors to use a DNS server closest to them, cutting latency times and getting their DNS queries answered 10 to 100 times faster than with standard UniCast DNS providers.

Out of these, only one has affordable pricing: DNS Made Easy . For less than $30/year can host DNS service for 10 domain at lightning speeds!

Measuring results

Go check out the speed of your current DNS service here at ultratools.com. Look at the max delays! With Moniker DNS servers you may get delays as long as 350 ms, if not flat out dropped requests! You can…

When it comes to choosing a dedicated server, choosing between the offerings can be daunting, especially when looking at the processors! There are so many that it's almost impossible to compare them.

• There are two manufacturers with different technologies
• They each have several different product lines
• They have the same processors with different numbers of cores
• They have the same processors with different added features
• Within each product line there are different generations of chips
• Within each generation there are different clock speeds

It used to be relatively easy: 486 was better than 386 which was better than 286... but there are no numbers any more. Only cryptic names and multiple variations. If you're not a CPU geek, you're doomed...

My advice for most dedicated servers would be this: go for the one that has the most RAM. Then only try to compare processors. RAM is much more important than you'd think for servers, especially if you have database driven apps.

Now, what I frequently miss is a rough guide to what CPU is newer/better than which others. I tried to put this together below...

As I understand it, here's how I'd order the Intel processors, from the best to the weakest:

1. Itanium
2. Xeon
3. Core2 Extreme
4. Core2 Quad
5. Core2 Duo
6. Pentium Extreme
7. Pentium Dual-Core
8. Pentium D
9. Pentium 4 HT Extreme
10. Pentium 4 HT
11. Celeron Dual-Core
12. Celeron D
13. Celeron

Here's how I believe you could roughly rank AMD processors (from best to weakest):

1. Opteron Quad Core
…