TTLs

KYNGIN uses 5 minute TTL's on all zone records by default.  You can change this up to 2 days, but we don't typically recommend longer TTLs ( > 4 hours) as it's benefits asks for more trouble than it's probably worth.

Many DNS resolvers use prefetching so the short TTL of 5 minutes shouldn't be a performance concern for anyone. If they aren't, they should be, or you should use another provider.  In the case you have a highly demanding website, it's unlikely DNS TTL's would be any cause for website delays as the DNS resolver will prefetch any queries that come in toward the end of the TTL lifecycle (or even serve stale records while they fetch live ones) thereby eliminating a synchronous request after record expiry (which would cause a delay in DNS lookup).

Basically, in less-techy english - We increase server load on our systems (as well recursive internet systems), by using 5 minute TTL's, but the benefits largely reduce the human time component (the most costly in the equation).  When considering that we need to have DNS entries updated within specific windows, this 5 minute TTL nearly eliminates the pitfall of an invalid stale DNS entry that causes an outage.

Suppose the DNS TTL is larger, like 60 minutes or even 120 minutes like most providers default.  That is a reduction on the server load for sure, but during an outage or cut-over you could easily have 120-240 minutes of downtime depending on the stale DNS cache.  With a 5 minute TTL, it's one less thing our members don't have to worry about, and yes it costs us more system resources to do this, but we still recommend it, because it costs our customers far less.  In our opinion, 5-10 minutes is a fair compromise of DNS lookup performance and lack of human time wasted on waiting for DNS TTL's to expire.