GoDaddy's DNS Service is Down(godaddy.com) |
GoDaddy's DNS Service is Down(godaddy.com) |
Now I need to bust a nut and get things moved off ASAP.
I'd be really interesting to get some behind-the-scenes data on what happened and what it took to fix it.
It's not free but close enough to it for your purposes here.
Surprisingly, all the reasons to stay on GD vanished this afternoon :-P
ETA is 6 hours
For DNS, I recommend dnsimple. They do DNS and domain registration for my three domains and their UI is amazing. Here's a referral link that, if used, gives both of us one month free DNS service (which is only $3 anyway). https://dnsimple.com/r/96a980397648e9
References:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoDaddy.com#Marketing (Wikipedia: GoDaddy.com: Marketing) [2]: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/01/godaddy_defends/ ("GoDaddy Defends SecLists Takedown," Kevin Poulsen, January 25, 2007, Threat Level) [3]: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57349913-281/godaddy-bows-... ("GoDaddy bows to boycott, now 'opposes' SOPA copyright bill," Declan McCullagh, December 29, 2011, CNET News) [4]: http://www.bobparsons.me (Bob Parsons) [5]: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/daddy-ceo-bob-parsons-africa-... ("Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons: Africa Elephant Hunt Video 'Nothing to Be Ashamed Of'," Susanna Kim and Michael S. James, April 2, 2011, ABC News)
!) Look for hosting companies that are targeting developers (Linode and Heroku are both good at this). The tools and UI will be more sane and you'll have a more pleasant interaction.
2) Avoid bargain bin VPS services for anything that's not a playground. If it can't disappear tomorrow forever, it's not bargain-bin material.
Now we need to switch to DynDNS asap who say they are getting tons of calls right now
The sender might also get a delivery failure message from the relay.
To clear things up a bit: $ whois =godaddy.com
See: http://superuser.com/questions/37954/how-to-use-command-line...
I usually don't root against companies but they are exceptionally bad.
Also, do backups, use good password practices, and everything else that everyone knows and the lazy will still fail to do.
Oh, 20 seconds in and a downvote. I can take them, I didn't ignore the last 8 problems GoDaddy has been responsible for lately and am not hurting from this outage.
Absolutely nothing useful to add to the discussion, just snark. Yet for some reason its the highest voted comment.
In this case, the problem is that DNS is a distributed database, and the idea that people are hosting websites with all of their DNS from a single provider that is at the same time acting as their registrar (whose only purpose in the DNS infrastructure is to mediate your ability to change your DNS servers and renew your account) is horrific: it means something horrendously wrong has occurred in this community.
Meanwhile, the comments here are just strange: people talking about "switching providers without downtime" when the whole point of how DNS works is that you can have arbitrarily many servers and thereby have multiple providers hosting your zones at once. To even have a webpage in the first place you had to setup DNS, and if you somehow skipped that step then you probably skipped tons of other important steps. :(
Reading this entire thread is thereby just depressing: this isn't some advanced corner case of A/B testing leading to improved knowledge of how to do pricing, this is web hosting 101. Yet, somehow, we have 308 upvotes and 238 comments that have been left about an outage of a single provider for the only component in the entire stack of a website where you almost have to go out of your way to not have fault tolerance.
Then, as opposed to trying to get this discussion out of the way as soon as possible, we are just being flooded with a combination of people claiming that this is important, and that those who disagree are being "snarky", combined with opportunistic bloggers submitting tutorials like the "GoDaddy Outage: How to Migrate to AWS Route 53" that was just posted.
Therefore, I will claim that it isn't drivebyacct2 that is indicative of a loss of HN quality: it is instead that somehow any of this was relevant in the first place, and that once posted it keeps spreading. I can understand people being interested when AWS or Heroku or even GitHub goes offline, but no one on Hacker News should care if GoDaddy DNS goes offline.
You're attempting to marginalize GP's comment as "snark," but I'm not seeing it.
A potential solution to get this fixed:
1. SNRKY_COMMENTS = {MODs manually tag comments such as OP}
2. SNRKY_UPVOTERS = {Users who upvote SNRKY_COMMENTS}
3. Vote = Vote * 0.5 , if user(Vote) ∈ SNRKY_UPVOTERS
Sure, it may be snark but I sure as hell hope it motivates at least one more person to switch. And apparently it has, unless I'm failing to detect sarcasm on one of the other replies.
This entire conversation should be useless because there shouldn't be people here still using GoDaddy.
For shame.
One is in a moral sense - something along the lines of "If you use GoDaddy, you share its guilt for its bad acts and deserve punishment". That's unfair, of course.
Another possible meaning is that anyone who fails to research something as important as a domain name registrar is suffering the natural consequences of their actions when a poor choice causes them problems. A person doesn't have to be very savvy to read the Wikipedia article and see that GoDaddy has been involved in several high-profile controversies regarding mistreatment of customers.
I don't think someone asserting the second should be shamed, though it doesn't seem to be very valid. I didn't come up with much negative information outside of the Wikipedia article when I avoided search terms specifically related to known issues.
Are there really a lot of "not-too-savvy" folks who understand that they need GoDaddy to provide them DNS servers but know better than to use someone else for DNS services and/or registration? Maybe I underestimate the size of that population.
I should and do apologize... I'm getting a lot of flak for my tone. No one deserves for their sites to be down, but I have no sympathy for HN readers who experience downtime. This issue has been discussed to death too many times for it to be an honest surprise to anyone here.
> If you are using GoDaddy for anything, you deserve what you get. If you are using GoDaddy for not just registration but also for DNS, I would just fix it as soon as possible and not tell anyone.
...to something like this:
"GoDaddy has a history of not only being bad with customer support, but also being the target for many politically motivated attacks for business practices which are not forthright or above-board. If you use them for registration and DNS, you are likely to get burned, so I suggest moving to another provider in short order once this clears up."
You could do a lot to benefit people without the vitriol, snark and associated venom.
I didn't downvote you.
But you might have gotten downvoted because you said "If you are using GoDaddy for anything, you deserve what you get." w/o giving links or further information. The things you are thinking might not be obvious to everyone.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/31/bob-parsons-godaddy...
http://gizmodo.com/5870559/as-if-you-needed-another-reason-t...
http://www.salmanahsan.com/godaddy-sucks/
http://www.oooff.com/blacklist/why-godaddy-sucks.php
http://www.simpleproductivityblog.com/why-i-left-godaddy/
From what I gather you should take your money elsewhere because: (1) they love SOPA (even though they redacted their support) (2) they have awful customer service and seedy sell tactics (3) have ads which are sexist and (4) have a CEO who likes hunting elephants.
If those don't bother you then you can now add have DNS servers go down for significant portions of time.
Even wikipedia ditched GoDaddy several months ago.
Citing sources for your opinion is good practice, I agree, but so is independent due diligence.
Because it seems like there are a lot of suggestions to move to alternate services that are in almost every case more expensive, but may or may not be any more reliable. It is well known that there are entities in control of botnets large enough to DDoS just about anything for some period of time.
ETA: Source- http://storify.com/poe/anonymous-lulz-and-godaddy
I admit that I know very little about DNS, to the point where I don't understand large parts of your post. I have a website, and I vaguely remember doing stuff to get the domain name to resolve, years ago. I know roughly that DNS translates domain names to IP addresses, but not much more. I'm okay with not knowing much more than that. I'm confident I can learn if necessary, but so far I've been learning the prerequisite knowledge of other fields.
If I was using godaddy, this thread would be helpful to me.
I don't know why people are upset about talking about GoDaddy. Its interesting news.
The biggest pressure here is speed, though. A timeout on a failed DNS lookup is an eternity when you're aiming for sub-second page loads.
There are guidelines surrounding commenting/submissions here: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Just knock it off and get back to posting interesting discussion. If you're not doing that, you're contributing to the "hurting of HN." And I'm well within my understanding of hypocrisy and irony to be aware of the fact that I'm committing this exact fault, so thanks for pointing that out, you're so intelligent.
So, no more shame, but just consider that it is possible to be sympathetic towards someone without endorsing their behavior.
At least, I assumed they aren't putting Danica Patrick in Super-Bowl commercials for the benefit of the HN crowd.
Edit: also, there is a great deal of inertia to overcome for a registar change, so a bit of shove (instead of gentle encouragement) may be warranted.
I'm a bit upset because this subthread is so vitriolic as a result of my tone and I am sorry for that.
What a classy bit of self-reflection. Keep up the good work :)
Try registering for a domain and get an idea of how aggressively and unabashedly they try to upsell you things you have zero need for, how difficult they make it to "transfer" domains. Generally, these practices are good signs of trouble, and a good hint that it's better to take business elsewhere. I should not have to spend hours upon hours wading through BS to do trivial tasks.
Their UI is there to provide one purpose, confuse user's into buying stuff. It seems to have worked for the most part.
I think we just need to remember that most people reading HN is not the target audience GoDaddy is looking for (IMO).
I would call that a technical issue, even though it probably only affects web crawlers.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2964084 2: http://rscott.org/dns/GoDaddy_Selective_DNS_Blackouts.htm
So, now what do we switch to?
- No Up-sells - Simple intuitive clean powerful UI - Pricing transparency - Security - Innovative management tools for handling larger domain portfolios
DNS functionality will be rolled out in the coming month.
But I've also been migrating my domains away from GoDaddy for purely technical reasons.
One is that the UI is constantly changing, with its sole goal to be deliberately counterintuitive. There are key places where it tells you click on a link, without just offering the link right there, so you have to hunt it down on the page. Crazy.
But the worst one is that I can no longer read their emails in mutt. At all. It was refreshing to get simple notifications from Namecheap that were short and easy to read.
You can communicate constructively and effectively without being so asinine. Here is an example of your initial comment with a bit kinder language:
Unfortunately, GoDaddy's services are often quite lackluster. I would urge current users to switch all their Godaddy-hosted services to other, more reliable providers.
Also, always remember to follow security best-practices such as using secure passwords, conducting regular backups, and the like.
There, was that really so hard?
> ^ Some authorities proscribe the last sense, "contradiction of circumstances and expectations, condition contrary to what might be expected"[2], but it has been common since the 1600s.[3]
Close enough for government work.
Definitional pedantism aside, I think my point is clear.
Nice try though.
Also, read that definition again. It is not archaic, it is modern "it has been common since the 1600s". This definition was pulled from wiktionary.
So to review, I dared use the word "irony" in an informal fashion, and you are a snarky pedant.
The problem was, the malware was only visible when the referrer was "Google", so they claimed there was nothing wrong. For weeks.
Either way, when it came down to it, one of their other shared clients were compromised and their sandboxing was rather insufficient leading to most of the clients on that box having some sort of malware installed. I'm sure the person in question was targeted because it looked like a standard install and frankly, if I was targeting shared hosting providers, I'd create my malware to be easy to integrate with WordPress.
I hope that makes it more clear why I find it to be GoDaddy's fault. In the end of the day, they understood what was wrong, apologized and fixed it.
It is slightly misleading (since the default search box is for .com), but all it says is "DOMAINS FROM 3.99"
which is absolutely true. Some .info domains go for as low as $3.99
That is nowhere near as bad as GoDaddy's upselling crap PLUS namecheap's configuration and control panels are really nice to use.
Comparing GoDaddy to NameCheap is like comparing MySpace (before the last major redesign) to Facebook. They both have to make money somehow (and so have certain lame tactics to be competitive), but NameCheap is obviously lightyears beyond godaddy in any informed persons mind (ESPECIALLY when actually using the service after having paid for it... NameCheap's control panels are the best i've ever seen anywhere)
Check this out for real-time query speed testing: http://cloudharmony.com/dnstest
(And yeah, looks like GoDaddy is a solid "Test failed" still...)
Funny note after running the test a few times--the worst performing provider is the one whose salespeople contact me the most...
You really think they'd resort to deception for an extra 50 cents per month? Ignorance before malice.
Even so, you never answered my original question. How'd you determine it was a sandboxing problem rather than your own WordPress installation being compromised? Seems even less so considering you didn't realize you had to update WordPress yourself.
They. Told. Me. It. Was. Their. Fault.
If you're in the rare situation of using GoDaddy DNS but don't use them as a registrar, then you're in luck. Simply sign up with a new DNS provider. They will give you their DNS servers which you need to set as the DNS servers that are authoritative for your domain. Then sign into your registrar and change the authoritative DNS servers for your domain. There will be a propagation delay but once it's done you're all set.
If you are in the extremely common situation of having registered your domain through GoDaddy and also use their DNS service, then you have a problem because to move to another DNS provider you need to sign into GoDaddy.com to make the change I've described above i.e. change which DNS provider is authoritative for your domain. You can't do this until GoDaddy.com is back online. So what I suggest is that you sign up for a new DNS provider and then keep checking GoDaddy.com. As soon as it comes back online, sign in and make the change to your new provider as quick as you can.
Other data:
Whois requests for godaddy domains are currently failing because whois.godaddy.com is offline due to name resolution failure.
Godaddy's twitter feed is a good source of updates, although they are claiming to be making progress and all my godaddy DNS hosted domains are still offline, so it seems to be more marketing speak than real data: https://twitter.com/godaddy
As mentioned, Anonymous seems to be behind it as three tweets on their twitter account seem to indicate: https://twitter.com/AnonOpsLegion
I don't think the scale of this attack is fully understood yet. According to the CBC, GoDaddy hosts over 5 million websites (not sure if that's DNS, registrar, etc) so expect this to be big news and potentially the next political football.
Edit: And finally, http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ is down for everyone because it's over quota. Via Reddit which is also covering this: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/znvwk/godaddycom...
We need a new site: http://www.is-downforeveryoneorjustme-downforeveryoneorjustm...
Sorry for the useless comment
Assumes of course that people have their zone file to refer to. Which they should. Even if you don't know what a zone file is it's probably a good idea to at the very least make a screen grab of the information where the info is shown at your registrar. Or just use dig from the command line (see my comment further down for syntax).
You actually can. You will have to modify your /etc/hosts file, go to your GoDaddy account and change to a new DNS service (name servers)
I followed the instructions in this post and I solved the GoDaddy hell for my sites:
http://davewasmer.tumblr.com/post/31283249223/migrating-from...
What to tell your customers when an upstream service provider experiences an outage? I mean, if you're running ifttt.com your users might be savvy enough to understand that a DNS outage isn't your fault; but pinterest.com or whatever (painting with broad strokes here, forgive me) might not have a user base that would understand that events out of your control have made your site inaccessible.
How do you reassure your customers? What's the proper tone to take?
Good push for anyone to switch to DNSMadeEasy or Amazon Route53 if you're currently caught in this.
Update: It appears Anonymous is behind this https://twitter.com/AnonOpsLegion/status/245218636187443200
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/dns/
There are many, many options.
And not only my sites are now down, but all the sites I maintain for clients. If some individual (or group) has done this intentionally, then these people are responsible for taking hundreds, maybe thousands of small businesses off line today. They're cutting into their sales, hurting their bottom lines, and if it continues for too long, will probably lead to people being laid off.
So you can sit on your techie high horses and think you're oh so smart, but the fact is, these are real business people doing real business and criminals are hurting them. So you come down on the honest people for signing contracts and paying their bills on time?
Seriously?
Godaddy's dns:
Name Server: CNS1.SECURESERVER.NET
Name Server: CNS2.SECURESERVER.NET
Name Server: CNS3.SECURESERVER.NET
Name Server: NS07.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Name Server: NS08.DOMAINCONTROL.COMI'm reminded of the Romney records[1] and more recently the Apple device IDs[2] stories.
[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4480301 [2]: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4500479
Domain Name: GODADDY.COM
Registrar: GODADDY.COM, LLC
Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com
Name Server: A1.VERISIGNDNS.COM
Name Server: A2.VERISIGNDNS.COM
Name Server: A3.VERISIGNDNS.COM
Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientRenewProhibited
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 10-sep-2012
Creation Date: 02-mar-1999
Expiration Date: 01-nov-2021
Default server: a1.verisigndns.com Address: 2001:500:7967::2:33#53 > www.godaddy.com Server: a1.verisigndns.com Address: 209.112.113.33#53
Name: www.godaddy.com Address: 184.168.227.107
The GoDaddy status page proudly announces "No issues to report": http://support.godaddy.com/system-alerts/
During last week's GoDaddy mail outage, they had no status info posted, even hours after reports on NANOG/Outages: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.operators.isotf.outages/...
Status Alert: Hey, all. We're aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We're working on it.
That understates things by several orders of magnitude. It's not just their site that is down, it's their domain name servers, so most websites that bought their domain from GoDaddy are unreachable (unless you are working off of cached domain data).
Most people who buy from GoDaddy probably host their DNS there as well though.
But I got a call earlier today from my less tech-savvy buddy who was freaking out because his GoDaddy website was down. Yea it is probably "his fault" for choosing them, and he probably "deserves it".
Still, not everyone is born a leet computer hacker, and sometimes this is the only way people will learn, so I'm trying not to be too hard on people for that.
216.69.149.215 mya.godaddy.com
216.69.149.90 idp.godaddy.com
216.69.149.9 dcc.godaddy.com
3. Change DNS providers.
GODADDY.COM.VATAXIDERMIST.COM GODADDY.COM.THEYOUNGCONS.COM GODADDY.COM.THEVILLAGEAT63RDSTREET.COM GODADDY.COM.THEFOREXTHIEF.COM GODADDY.COM.THECOTTONWIFE.COM GODADDY.COM.TEST.CHUMCHUM.NET GODADDY.COM.STAGEDOORPRODUCTIONS.COM GODADDY.COM.SKATEONGRANDROLLERRINK.COM GODADDY.COM.SHOPCOULSDON.COM GODADDY.COM.SHIRLEEMCGARRY.COM GODADDY.COM.SETHPAPA.COM GODADDY.COM.SANGRAALBODYWORK.COM GODADDY.COM.RESPECTED.BY.WWW.DNDIALOG.COM GODADDY.COM.REMEDIASERVICES.COM GODADDY.COM.QUINTAFLORIDA.COM GODADDY.COM.QHSSE.COM GODADDY.COM.PISSEDOFFPEOPLEOFAMERICA.COM GODADDY.COM.MYANHOMEINSPECTION.COM GODADDY.COM.MUTTLANDMEADOWS.COM GODADDY.COM.MICHALPOE.COM GODADDY.COM.MERCHANTSSTORES.COM GODADDY.COM.LOVE8PLANET.COM GODADDY.COM.LEVIATHANCOMPUTERS.NET GODADDY.COM.LANDLCONNECTION.COM GODADDY.COM.KARLAADAMS.COM GODADDY.COM.JESSICABOAL.COM GODADDY.COM.IXCANADESIGNS.COM GODADDY.COM.INDYMETROWOMAN.COM GODADDY.COM.GGONYA.NET GODADDY.COM.GDDAS.COM GODADDY.COM.FLORIDASURETY.COM GODADDY.COM.FLETCHERANDFLETCHERPHOTOGRAPHY.COM GODADDY.COM.EZGRAPHICSLOGOS.COM GODADDY.COM.ERICAMDESIGNS.COM GODADDY.COM.EAGLEEYEHOMEMONITORING.COM GODADDY.COM.CLIFFYCELLS.COM GODADDY.COM.CAKEMUFFIN.COM GODADDY.COM.BERNADETTEHAROLD.COM GODADDY.COM.BANGALORESRESTAURANTS.COM GODADDY.COM.AUTHORMARIONBROWN.COM GODADDY.COM.AND.ALEX.FUCKED.BY.WWW.DNDIALOG.COM GODADDY.COM.ANALOGANIMALRECORDS.COM GODADDY.COM.ALEXANDREAREINA.COM GODADDY.COM.AIPOS.NET GODADDY.COM.1BEAUTYPRO.COM GODADDY.COM
What you are seeing above (and some of the examples) are the result of clueless customers who got some instruction and entered into the wrong field at their registrar. Other cases are people trying to get hits or bring attention to their site. This has been around since the mid 90's at least.
Is that a question? :)
See this, relative to my comment above:
FACEBOOK.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM
FACEBOOK.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
FACEBOOK.COM.LOVED.BY.WWW.SHQIPHOST.COM
FACEBOOK.COM.KNOWS.THAT.THE.BEST.WEB.HOSTING.IS.NASHHOST.NET
FACEBOOK.COM.GET.ONE.MILLION.DOLLARS.AT.WWW.UNIMUNDI.COM
But no, it carried on to: 'Today's Lesson - SAVINGS! 20% OFF*'
Sure, they didn't take my side in the SOPA debate, but I'd rather live in a world where everyone is entitled to their opinion.
I'm also not comfortable with a group calling themselves "Hackers" giving my profession a foul name by activities like this. This is like bombing a nation which doesn't have same views as yours. Hackers, they are not. Shameful.
When I asked for a refund, I was told I could only get in store credit. In store credit for a virtual good that hasn't been activated/used and arguably charged without my consent? Joke of a company.
BTW one of the servers we needed to access did not resolve, but I was able to connect via IP instead of DNS. Host file baby!
So what can we conclude from this incident?
GoDaddy's registrar service GoDaddy's authoritative DNS service GoDaddy's hosting service GoDaddy SSL certificates etc.
They are all different services. When you link them all together and give GoDaddy control over your entire setup, if there's a problem with any one service, you can't recover as easily as if they were each handled independently. meme: "Do one thing well."
"All-in-one" solutions, though they might provide convenience, might come at a cost in terms of disaster recovery. meme: SPOF
I wonder if this thinking might also apply to software: using a single, large "all-in-one" program versus using lots of smaller, independent (and replaceable) programs.
Of course, if someone were to do this same thing to BuddyNS I would be up a creek for a little while, but I could just login to Namecheap and point to a different secondary.
[1]: http://tinydns.org/
If you can point to ways you'll improve the service in the future as a result of the outage, all the better.
When we had a large DoS attack at Posterous, I wrote two posts, one as soon as possible (http://blog.posterous.com/todays-outage-and-changes-for-cust...), and the next as a bit of a post-mortem (http://blog.posterous.com/moving-forward). Both explained that there were many factors beyond our control, but that the responsibility was ultimately ours, and we were working to learn from the event and improve our services as a result.
They weren't perfect posts, but I think they went a long way toward being open and honest with our users in the midst of a major negative event.
Once you're a service provider -- whether your services in turn rely on other services or not -- reasons stop mattering. As a practical matter, you and I know that there's no way you can build a fully scalable, fully redundant infrastructure from the ground-up in your first week. Hell, if you ever build that kind of infrastructure at all, you'll be way ahead of most companies.
But, that's the kind of infrastructure you should be working towards building, all the time. You should have a clear roadmap for ensuring data integrity, then dealing with security, then dealing with redundancy, and finally high availability.
If your service falls over for any reason, ultimately it's because you haven't done something on your roadmap yet. There's no way to explain that to your customers that doesn't sound like you're trying to pass the fault on to someone else -- because that's exactly what you're doing.
So just 'fess up to your customers: "one of the services that our business relies on had some serious technical problems that affected us today, but we recognize that ultimately it's our responsibility to make sure that our service is always available to you. We're constantly working on our infrastructure to make it more reliable, but we clearly still have more work to do. We will be changing some of our priorities so that this won't be a problem in the future. Thank you for sticking with us." (And then do it, otherwise this will backfire on you the next time you have an outage of similar cause.)
As an aside: I generally take a softer stance towards user responsibilities -- of course everyone should have backups, but Joe Schmoe just doesn't have time for that -- but a much harder stance towards businesses. Once you accept money from someone, you put yourself into a position of absolute responsibility for whatever it is that people rely on you for. If you can't guarantee the availability of your service or the safety of their data, then you shouldn't be taking their money.
I'd argue that such an outage _is_ your fault. If you're worried about Customer perceptions as a result of outages of third-party services your site relies on then, I'd argue, you need to have redundancy in your choice of third-party services. If it's important enough to worry about it should be important enough to spend some money on and do something about. If that drives up your costs then your product's cost, to your Customers, needs to reflect that.
Example:
1) setup amixdomain.com at, say, zoneedit.com (not recommending them just using as an example).
2) Wait a bit, say several hours then use a dns utility like the one at kloth.net to query the two zoneedit.com dns servers directly. If both of them answer for your domain you are in good shape. I don't know what the lag is until zoneedit reloads their dns. It could be in a minute or it could take longer (which is why you can just wait).
Or you can use the OSX (or equivalent on other platforms) dig tool from the command line as follows, using ycombinator.com as an example:
Edit: What I meant to say was "if you have a mac open a terminal session and use dig" sorry for seeming to implying that dig is an OSX tool.
dig @NS1.EASYDNS.COM ycombinator.com 'A'
yc's servers are, so I picked one. You want to query all the dns servers:
Name Server: NS1.EASYDNS.COM
Name Server: NS2.EASYDNS.COM
Name Server: NS3.EASYDNS.ORG
Name Server: NS6.EASYDNS.NET
Name Server: REMOTE1.EASYDNS.COM
Name Server: REMOTE2.EASYDNS.COM
Aside from that, focus on two concepts: TTL and overlap.
1) On your old host, lower the TTL of all your records to something quite low, like 30 seconds. This will increase the burden on your nameservers, since records will only be cached that long, but it will make you more nimble as you make substantial changes.
2) Migrate your records over to the new provider. This can be a bit tedious for more complex zones, but rather straight-forward for many. Change your nameserver on your local machine to point to your new DNS host, just to test in a "real-world" scenario.
Then go to your registrar and flip the switch.
Switching DNS providers is much less prone to downtime than changing web hosts, since the records themselves aren't changing much -- just where to find them.
If you're switching registrars, the principal is similar, setting the TTL quite low during the transition to help you make changes more quickly should something go wrong.
Imo, having done this since the mid 90's, you don't have to mess with TTL since you aren't changing any of the records. And having someone do that is an additional thing to mess with that adds unnecessary steps.
TTL would be necessary if you are going from one IP to another or a different MX server etc. though.
If you're literally just changing DNS providers why would there be any down time - the record showing the IP where to find your website just gets grabbed from a different location, if a stale record is used it's still right.
[1] (Affiliate) http://www.namecheap.com?aff=37912
[2] (Non-Affiliate) http://www.namecheap.com
[3] http://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/...
Gradually clients will switch over to the new DNS servers, but as long as both servers resolve to the same IP you should be fine.
Generally you'll want to set up your new DNS, turn down the refresh on your existing DNS domains, wait $old_refresh or so, then change your primary/secondaries listed at your registrar to point at your new DNS.
Their website/UI wasn't any good, very dated, they even rolled out a new one before I left, but that was horrible, they used AJAX everywhere, just for the sake of using it, and it made usability horrible.
Their support sucked as well, you would need to submit a ticket, and they take forever to get back to you, and they don't say anything besides "it looks fine to me". If you try and call them, you end up talking with someone who has no idea what they are talking about (same customer support line, for multiple products), or they don't speak english well.
You end up paying per DNS query, which is a really expensive way to pay for DNS, we were paying thousands of dollars a month to them for DNS alone.
Their advanced DNS services (DNS load balanceer and DNS failover) where very basic, and getting them setup correctly was a PITA.
There DNS service was nice until it crashed, which didn't happen often, but when it did, it took down half the internet with them.
http://cyberinsecure.com/ddos-attack-against-neustar-hits-ma...
I personally wouldn't have picked them to be our provider if it wasn't for one of our investors telling us how great they are and we needed to use them. I should have listened to my gut, but I also didn't want to piss off the guy paying the bills.
YMMV, but I would say, stand clear, and go to one of the newer folks doing the same thing for much less the cost, and more features.
But I don't find the quotes on their website to be confidence inspiring: "UltraDNS manages and maintains its own industry leading resolver platform; as a non-open source platform it isn't prone to hijacking, spoofing or viruses".
And their industry positioning scares me:
The revised bill would place a ".kids" subdomain under the
control of NeuStar Inc., the Washington-based
telecommunications company that won the contract to manage
the ".us" country-code domain last fall.
NeuStar would be expected to police the subdomain to ensure
it remains free of inappropriate content, and it would
answer to the Commerce Department's National
Telecommunications and Information Administration.
Web sites in the domain would be prohibited from linking to
sites outside it, and they could not set up chat rooms,
instant messaging or other interactive services unless they
could certify that they did not expose children to
pedophiles or pose other risks.
If privately held NeuStar were to lose money on the
venture, it could give control back to the Commerce
Department, which would seek another operator.
ps. You're probably aware, but I was checking if the site listed in your profile was served by them, and noticed that many9s.com looks to have expired over the weekend.
For DNS hosting I'm currently happy with
So, my reply in one sentence: a business should never charge less than it needs to meet its customers' expectations.
I don't think I've ever seen any hosted service brazenly advertise, "It only costs $4 a month and it's only down for a couple of days a year!" Instead, hosted services advertise their pricing, and then hide their uptime "guarantee" (in quotes because it's only a guarantee to the extent that there might be refunds involved if they don't meet it) somewhere in their fine print, or as a number that sounds impressive to people who don't know better, like, "99%!"
The problem with that is that your customers still expect your service to work. If your customers build a business of their own using your service -- and if you have enough customers, somebody is gonna try to do that -- then they can be seriously impacted if your service fails. At that point you have an adversarial relationship with your customer. As a business, you want to say, "but you're only paying $4 a month! What did you expect?", but as a customer, that's just about the worst possible response.
I think the race to the bottom in pricing is a really bad idea. GoDaddy's a really good example to use here. How many of their customers do you think couldn't afford an extra $1 a month, and at their scale, how much could they improve their service if they made an extra $1/month per customer? Conversely, how much damage does GoDaddy do to the hosting industry as a whole every time they piss off their millions of customers? I think you have to charge enough money to make your customer happy, and that includes a little extra to make sure your service continues to grow and improve and that you continue to be happy so that you'll continue to want to work on your business.
Once the business is up and running at some price point, and your infrastructure is, let's say, 75% complete, then start looking in to ways to reduce your price without compromising your service. Maybe if you find a thousand more customers, some network effects will kick in and you'll be able to charge everybody a little bit less. Great, go find those customers.
And, let's not ignore that the technology available to service providers right now is amazing. I first wanted to be an ISP in 1995. Back then, your startup costs were atrocious, the technology was unreliable, documentation was opaque (no such thing as howtoforge!), and you had to rely on industry fatcats that would shake with their right hand and shank you with their left.
Now there's Linode, Rackspace, Hurricane Electric, Slicehost, Heroku, Amazon, and a ton of others, all offering easy-to-use, low-cost, reliable services that you can build your business on. It's really amazing stuff. While individually they have sporadic issues, collectively they're rock-solid. So, unless you're offering a service that cracks hashes, I have trouble imagining that it would cost as much as $2,000 a month to provide a 100% uptime guarantee. If you just want to host a particular technology stack for customers, or provide SaaS, you should be able to engineer a really solid service for $50/month, tops.
Finally, I left room in my previous comment on this for businesses that are growing. I don't expect a business to have the perfect infrastructure in place the day that they launch. I do expect them to, at the very least, have solid backups in place and an idea of what to do if everything goes upside-down one day. Then, once they start getting customers, they should focus on improving their infrastructure. If a business is a year old and they have a few hours' downtime one day, I don't think to myself, "Pf, amateurs." But, if a business is two or three years old, and their customers' usernames and passwords just showed up on pastebin because they wrote their web app in PHP and didn't use PDO? Yeah, amateurs for sure.
As a thought experiment, imagine if GoDaddy took all the money that they sunk into Superbowl ads and pretty women and other stupid marketing, and instead put that money towards being the best damn domain registrar and hosting service on the internet. I bet you they could monopolize their market. There'd no longer be any reason at all for any of their customers to use any other service. There'd no longer be any reason for a potential new customer to not use their service.
So, want to own your market? Build an unbeatable service. (Or product.)
And you have to charge your customers enough money to do that.
(What I was trying to say was "if you have a mac open a terminal session and use dig".)
Exactly.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/zacju/9gag_repost_mac...
I've seen (and experienced) 10Gigabit+ DDoS attacks and generally they end up taking down the entire data-center, but that's smaller provider levels. I can't imagine that level of attack should take down Godaddy, but then who knows what they're actually running behind the scenes. Essentially, what I'm saying... is this is a large enough issue with the internet today that a provider this large should have had at least SOME protections in place for this already (And perhaps Verisign might have been a decent enough choice, or Prolexic...).
For DNS, I recommend dnsimple. They do DNS and domain registration for my three domains and their UI is amazing. Here's a referral link that, if used, gives both of us one month free DNS service (which is only $3 anyway). https://dnsimple.com/r/96a980397648e9
Short anecdote: I have an Icelandic (.is) domain. Iceland's NIC has very strict rules regarding DNS records associated with an Icelandic domain. dnsimple's support team got the problem resolved within a few days. I can definitely see myself with them for the long haul.
Still, we're going to do our best to switch over to Anycast and continue building out our infrastructure as we have the capital to do so.
1) Get a new DNS server. I use http://dnspark.net/ and even though their website is very ugly and there's no API, they're tremendous value at $10 - $14 per year
2) In your registrar's page (godaddy) change your DNS servers for your domain to whatever your new ones are.
$0.500 per million queries – first 1 Billion queries / month $0.250 per million queries – over 1 Billion queries / month
I host about 70 zones and pay less than 20 dollars a month. There's no minimum, so I would expect a single zone to cost less than $2. You would need to get 10 million queries to reach $6.
[Edit: Facepalm - I just realized you said per year]
DNSPark gives you 5m lookups a month and never built in overage charging!
