Our company owns many country specific top level domains (TLDs; .sg, .my). We will purchase more for other countries in all South East Asia.

These domains are associated with our websites hosted on Amazon EC2.

The DNS records are currently hosted on a dedicated server that will shut down tomorrow. (The name servers are set to the ones of a web hosting company) Therefore, I will need to host the DNS records somewhere else.

Hosting the DNS records with the local registrar costs SGD18 a year per domain in addition to the domain price (which is already very expensive but we have no choice).

It would be convenience to host DNS recors for all the country specific TLDs we have using a single service, separate from the local registrars from which we bought the domains. A few searches prompted examples like Amazon Route 53 and dnsmadeeasy.com and the likes.

However, since I'm only concern about the country specific TLDs, not .com

1) Is it really economical to host DNS records of all domains in 1 single place as described above?
(Have the relevant countries and/or the local registrars done something to keep their monopoly and always charges ridiculous prices for their country specific TLDs?)

2) I would imagine I will need to tell the local registrars to update the name servers to those of the DNS hosting service provider e.g. dnsmadeeasy.com here.
Am I correct about how it works here?

3) Will I be able point the TLDs themselves to IP addresses I desire (the EC2 instances where my websites are) or will I only able to do so with the subdomains?

4) Are there any drawbacks that I should know here?
Background about our needs:

• We need the websites associated with the country TLDs to be up and running all the times
• Also, we'll need to be able to add/edit A and CNAME records
• We use Google Apps for Business for internal email so I will need to be able to add/edit MX records and TXT records