I had a look at amazon route 53 and decided to test it.

Found according to this http://network-speed.com/dnstime.php site that my ns1.linode.com hosted records stutter for 2-5 seconds every few lookups. Does this always happen?

Running a query from home to ns1.linode.com always results in a response time between 189 and 214ms. The tool you posted gave times between 266 and 283ms, except two of the ten queries took over 10 seconds each.

I tried the web tool twice, and since it was always the fifth and the tenth query that took so long, my guess is that this is a countermeasure by Linode to protect their nameservers against flooding attacks. Try querying with dig +noall +stats @69.93.127.10 name A (leave a few seconds between each run) and see what you get.

Yes I was thinking that, but then I got it on the second or third etc etc.. but it does make sense, a large DNS server like this would be a great target for cyberpunks haha

But I could see this being a problem as well, universities and large companies may all have the same IP.

Well my main DNS is on route 53 now, it really steams through in under 60ms consistently