What is the advantage of running own DNS server?

Question

What is the advantage, if any, of running one's own DNS server? Surely the link between domain name and IP address must already have been established?

Answer 1

DNS servers *are* the link between domain name and IP address. Someone has to run it, there is no other way to 'establish' it.

Like any service (such as web services, mail, cloud), the choice of whether to host it yourself or pay someone else to host it really
boils down to what you use it for. If you only have a small handful of domain names that rarely update, don't bother. If you have a dynamic, complex infrastructure, it might make sense.

Answer 2

I suppose a lot of it depends on your needs. For us, we run internal DNS servers for all the VMs we have running; mostly for software development and monitoring. It makes sense for us to do so as we have mostly Macs (and my Linux workstation) that work better using DNS. Had we been a mostly Windows shop, we'd likely use NetBIOS internally with some Dynamic DNS for
win clients.

We also have external DNS servers for our cloud based servers, web servers primarily. We could have stuck with Network Solutions (our Domain Registrar) for DNS, but we have a LOT of domains across the globe and we prefer handling them ourselves. Management can be a bit of a headache at time, but it's worth it, IMHO.