November 21, 2025

Stop Using Network Solutions for DNS (Seriously)

Network Solutions may have history, but as a DNS provider it’s stuck in the past. From a slow, clunky control panel and upsell-heavy “Premium DNS” to missing Anycast by default, broken apex/CNAME patterns, weak automation, and ticket-driven IPv6, we treat seeing Network Solutions in the NS records as a sign: it’s time to move.

Every time we onboard a new client who still uses Network Solutions for DNS, we know what’s coming: a slow control panel, confusing options, mysterious upsells, and a fight to get records or domains moved somewhere sane.

This article is that frustration written down.

I’m going to be blunt: for modern DNS, Network Solutions is a legacy registrar that survives on inertia, sticky processes, and upsells—not on being a great authoritative DNS provider. If you care about reliability, security, and your own time, you can do dramatically better.

How We Got Here: A Pioneer That Never Really Grew Up

Network Solutions has history. They were one of the earliest players in the domain game and helped run .com in the early days of the commercial internet. That legacy gives them brand recognition and a huge long-tail of customers who registered domains 10–20 years ago and never moved.

But that legacy comes with baggage.

In 2008, Network Solutions was hit with a class-action lawsuit over domain “tasting” and “front running,” where domains searched on their site were immediately locked up so only Network Solutions could sell them. You could argue that was a long time ago, but it set the tone: protect the business first, even if it makes life harder for customers.

Today, the story has shifted from front-running to something more mundane but just as annoying: clunky DNS tools, aggressive add-ons, and friction whenever you try to leave.

Reputation: The Scoreboard Is Ugly

Let’s start with the “would you recommend this to another human being?” metrics.

Across multiple consumer review and complaint sites, a pattern shows up again and again:

Poor ratings driven by billing issues, surprise or recurring charges, and difficulty canceling services.
Complaints about support passing people around, or telling customers to “wait for an email” that never arrives.
Stories where something simple—like a domain transfer or DNS change—turns into a multi-day ticket.

There are happy customers. When support agents get involved and resolve an issue quickly, people do leave positive reviews. But if you zoom out, the pattern is clear: when things are simple and you don’t touch anything, it’s “fine.” The moment you try to do something non-trivial—move DNS, transfer a domain, clean up billing—the complaints flood in.

For a DNS provider, that’s the wrong side of the distribution. DNS is not where you want drama.

The DNS Experience: Slow, Buried, and Weirdly Limited

As a DNS provider, Network Solutions’ tooling feels like it got stuck in the mid-2000s and never quite caught up.

1. The Control Panel Fights You

Admins regularly describe the interface as slow and buried. Editing a record is a multi-click ritual. You dig through domain lists, then a generic management screen, then an “advanced” section, then finally see the actual DNS records.

If you’re managing DNS for dozens of domains and services, that friction adds up quickly. Modern DNS providers give you:

A clear zone view with all records in one place.
Inline editing and bulk operations.
Search and filtering on record types and names.

With Network Solutions, it still feels like DNS is a bolted-on feature under a registrar UI, not a first-class product.

2. Arbitrary Limits That Don’t Make Sense in 2025

Their own advanced DNS documentation includes this gem: CNAME records can only be created for third-level domains. In plain English:

You can CNAME www.example.com.
You cannot CNAME example.com itself.

That’s exactly the opposite of what many CDNs and SaaS platforms expect, where pointing the root (example.com) to a target is the norm.

Modern DNS providers worked around the old RFC limitations years ago with techniques like:

CNAME flattening at the apex.
ALIAS or ANAME records that behave like a CNAME at the root.

Network Solutions? You’re still fighting the tool just to do patterns that are completely normal in 2025.

Premium DNS: Paying Extra for What Others Give You Free

Network Solutions pushes “Premium DNS” as an add-on: a paid service that covers DNS for a handful of domains registered with them.

Their marketing pitches Premium DNS as giving you:

Better performance and reliability.
Improved security features.
Extras like traffic balancing, monitoring, and reporting.

The problem isn’t that Premium DNS exists. The problem is where the bar is set.

Cloudflare, route-specific cloud DNS (Route 53, Azure DNS, Google Cloud DNS), and specialist DNS providers treat fast, globally distributed, Anycast DNS with DNSSEC as table stakes. Often you get it on a free or low-cost plan.

Meanwhile, Network Solutions treats “DNS that isn’t mediocre” as an upcharge. You’re paying premium prices for capabilities that are standard at specialized DNS providers.

Transfer-Out Friction: When Leaving Becomes a Project

If you’ve ever tried to move domains off Network Solutions, you know this section is coming.

There’s a long trail of stories about transfer friction:

Agencies trying to move domains out run into scare tactics: alarming warnings about service loss, upsells, and a process clearly designed to make people second-guess leaving.
Domain investors report repeated failures requesting auth codes, support insisting they “just wait for the email” that never arrives, and DNS changes failing without clear reasons—especially near renewal time.
Complaints describe a “pattern of doing everything they can to make the process as difficult as possible” when customers attempt to transfer domains out.

To be fair, Network Solutions does publish documentation on how to transfer domains away and how to prepare for a transfer.

But when the public docs say “overall, the process is straightforward” and the complaint boards are full of people saying “this was anything but straightforward,” that disconnect tells you a lot about priorities.

Security & Modern DNS Expectations: Not the Same League

To their credit, Network Solutions now supports DNSSEC and explains how to manage advanced DNS records. The problem isn’t the existence of toggles and help articles; it’s how far behind the curve they are compared to providers who live and breathe DNS.

Modern DNS best practice for production workloads looks something like this:

Globally distributed Anycast DNS with multiple points of presence.
DNSSEC as a default, not an afterthought.
Support for apex CNAME-like behavior (ALIAS/ANAME/flattening).
Clean APIs so DNS changes can be automated and integrated into CI/CD.

Network Solutions’ own DNS docs focus on:

A, MX, and CNAME records.
A UI that can’t create aliases for the root zone.
A fairly manual, multi-click process to change anything.

That’s not evil. It’s just not serious, production-grade DNS for the way people run infrastructure in 2025.

Technical Weaknesses: Why Network Solutions DNS Is Outclassed

If the business practices and UX weren’t enough, the technical story behind Network Solutions’ DNS is exactly what you’d expect from a legacy registrar: it works, but it’s badly out of step with modern expectations.

1. Anycast for Extra Money, Not as a Baseline

On today’s internet, serious DNS is almost always Anycast: many globally distributed nodes sharing the same IP, so queries go to the closest, healthiest location. That’s how the major DNS platforms deliver low latency and absorb DDoS attacks.

Network Solutions does acknowledge this reality—but only behind a paywall:

Their Premium DNS marketing calls out a “global network of high-performance DNS servers” and Anycast-based routing as key differentiators from their basic DNS.

Read between the lines:

Premium DNS gets Anycast, geolocation-style routing, and uptime guarantees.
Standard DNS (what most people are on by default) gets… silence on architecture. No mention of Anycast. No PoP map. No SLA worth quoting.

Plenty of modern providers treat Anycast as the starting point, not a luxury add-on. With Network Solutions, “DNS that behaves like it’s 2025” is something you have to upgrade into.

2. Broken Apex / CNAME Story

Network Solutions’ own documentation admits a fundamental limitation in their DNS manager:

CNAME records can only be created for third-level domains.

In practice, that means:

You can CNAME www.example.com → some.cdn.net.
You cannot CNAME example.com itself, which is exactly what many CDNs and SaaS platforms want you to do at the zone apex.

Instead, they steer you toward a separate web forwarding product for the root, which is just an HTTP redirect—not real DNS.

Modern DNS providers solved this years ago with:

ALIAS or ANAME records at the apex.
CNAME flattening that gives you CNAME behavior at the root without violating the RFCs.

With Network Solutions, the answer is effectively, “Sorry, our DNS manager can’t do that—buy a forwarding product or move.”

3. IPv6 Treated Like a Ticket, Not a Feature

IPv6 is not new. Yet Network Solutions handles AAAA records like a special-case support request.

Rather than letting you add and update AAAA records instantly (the way you would with A records), their documented process involves submitting changes that are manually reviewed and “processed within 24–48 business hours.”

If you’re running dual-stack infrastructure or testing IPv6 changes during a migration, “we’ll get back to you in 2 business days” is not a serious posture.

4. No Real Automation Story

Network Solutions is also conspicuously missing from the ecosystem of DNS providers that support APIs and infrastructure-as-code tooling.

There’s no widely documented DNS API.
They don’t show up in the provider lists for popular ACME/DNS-01 automation tools.
Monitoring and failover systems that integrate directly with DNS providers generally can’t talk to Network Solutions at all.

Meanwhile, Cloudflare, Route 53, NS1, and others all expose well-documented APIs and Terraform providers so DNS changes are part of your pipelines—not something a human has to click through at 2 a.m.

If you care about:

Automated certificate issuance (DNS-01 challenges).
Blue/green or canary deployments that flip DNS during rollout.
Dynamic failover based on health checks.

…Network Solutions’ “log into the control panel and click around” approach is a hard stop.

5. Slow, High-Friction Updates and Propagation

A few more technical paper cuts show up in how they handle updates:

High default TTLs. Their default TTLs skew high, which is fine for some static records but painful during migrations and cutovers.
Extra propagation lag. Even after you save changes in the panel, they warn that “advanced DNS updates” may take up to a couple of hours to push through their own systems—on top of normal internet-wide propagation.
Nameserver lock-in risk. To use their Advanced DNS Manager at all, you must point your domain’s nameservers to Network Solutions. They explicitly warn that doing this may disrupt existing services during the transition if you’re not careful.

Individually, none of these are catastrophic. Taken together, they paint a picture of a DNS platform that’s slow to change, hard to script, and primed for surprises any time you touch it.

6. DNSSEC as a Checkbox, Not a Strong Default

Network Solutions does support DNSSEC for domains using their nameservers, usually via a simple toggle in the control panel. That’s good, as far as it goes.

The catch is in the posture around it:

DNSSEC is presented as an optional extra, something to turn on if you feel like it.
Troubleshooting guidance frequently includes “try disabling DNSSEC and see if the problem goes away.”

Compare that to modern best practices, where DNSSEC is treated as a must-have layer of protection against cache poisoning and tampering, and where providers design their systems so you can leave it on and still make changes safely.

So yes, Network Solutions can tick the “supports DNSSEC” box—but the overall posture feels more like “flip it on until it causes trouble” than “this is a security-first DNS platform.”

So Why Are People Still There?

Honestly? Inertia.

Domains that were registered in 2003 and never moved.
Small businesses who let whatever registrar was popular at the time pick their DNS by default.
People who are afraid that touching DNS will break email, so they leave everything exactly as it was set up decades ago.

The result: Network Solutions continues to collect renewals on domains and DNS records that nobody wants to touch, even if the underlying service isn’t competitive anymore.

When Is Network Solutions DNS “Good Enough”?

To be fair, there are situations where keeping DNS at Network Solutions is survivable:

You have a single, low-traffic brochure site.
Your DNS rarely (or never) changes.
You don’t rely on fancy CDN setups, multi-tenant SaaS, or complex DNS failover.
You’re on a tight non-technical team that prioritizes “don’t touch it, it works” over modernization.

In those cases, Network Solutions DNS is like an old flip phone. It still dials out. It just doesn’t make sense if you’re trying to build anything ambitious.

What We Recommend Instead

For production workloads, we strongly prefer moving DNS to a provider that treats it as a first-class product, not an afterthought:

Cloudflare DNS for most public-facing sites and apps (especially if you’re already using their CDN, WAF, or Zero Trust stack).
AWS Route 53, Azure DNS, or Google Cloud DNS when your infrastructure is already tightly coupled to that cloud.
Specialist DNS providers (DNS Made Easy, NS1, etc.) when you need advanced routing, telemetry, and automation at scale.

These platforms:

Natively support modern patterns like ALIAS/CNAME flattening.
Include global Anycast and DNSSEC without making it a weird paid add-on.
Offer APIs and Terraform modules so DNS can live in your infrastructure-as-code.

In other words, they treat DNS like something important, not a line item to be upsold.

The Bottom Line

If all you know of DNS is “the place at Network Solutions where I click around until my site works,” it’s easy to assume that’s just how life is.

It’s not.

The wider DNS ecosystem has moved on: global Anycast networks, DNSSEC everywhere, rich analytics, API-driven updates, and sane handling of modern patterns like apex CNAMEs. Meanwhile, Network Solutions is still pushing basic DNS management as a legacy control panel feature and treating modern capabilities as a premium add-on.

That’s why, when we see Network Solutions listed as the authoritative DNS for a production domain, we don’t see “loyalty” or “stability.”

We see an action item: get this DNS off Network Solutions and onto something built for the internet we actually have.

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Table of Contents

How We Got Here: A Pioneer That Never Really Grew Up

Reputation: The Scoreboard Is Ugly