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There are DNS hosting services that let you set records for your domain. For example you can set A record to point to your webhost IP.

But most of the webhosts also allow you to set A records.

Would the DNS lookups be faster if I used the webhost directly?

Alex
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  • Hi, it's opinion based, as if the webhost is slow, versus a public's one, it can change the data, but what is sure is that a request the find the NS is already sent to your zone holder, thus a lookup after – yagmoth555 Oct 26 '18 at 19:05
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    In my experience, CloudFlare and AWS Route 53 are both dramatically faster than most hosting providers' own DNS offerings. More reliable, too. – ceejayoz Oct 26 '18 at 19:53
  • Speed of a lookup to an authoritative server shouldn't matter, since the reply should be cached by whatever DNS server(s) the client(s) are using. – ivanivan Oct 26 '18 at 20:03
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    @ivanivan It's pretty common these days to have low DNS TTLs - I've often got records set to 1-5 minutes. It matters a bit. – ceejayoz Oct 26 '18 at 20:15
  • @ceejayoz A recursive DNS server could deal with that scenario. When returning a cached entry which is past half of its lifetime, the recursor starts a new lookup from authoritative servers. The client will still get the fast cached response. And usually the new lookup will complete before the cached entry expires. That way for a domain queried often enough, the cache will always have an entry which hasn't expired yet. – kasperd Oct 27 '18 at 09:11

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There's really no way to know without actually comparing. But the usual opinion is that DNS hosting services compete based on how well they can host DNS while web hosting companies often just provide DNS hosting services in case people need them or to provide one stop shopping. DNS hosting services have to prioritize the quality of their DNS hosting while web hosting companies don't. Nevertheless, of course, a high-end web hosting company may well provide faster DNS hosting than a low-end DNS hosting service.

David Schwartz
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    Good answer, but I might add something about CloudFlare / Route53 having distributed infrastructure that means there's less latency between the user and the DNS server. This matters given many DNS TTLS are 5 minutes or less, particularly for cloud hosted load balancers like AWS ELB. – Tim Oct 26 '18 at 23:07