No major DNS provider would engage in a "Selective DNS Blackout" because of resource constraints - DNS is one of those protocols that is both embarrassingly parallel, as well as super efficient to serve. It's not unreasonable to see a well tuned, inexpensive (< $5K) DNS server provide on the order of 100,000 responses/second. And if you want to serve a million responses/second - just scale horizontally and add the resolvers to your VIP pool on your load balancer.
This article doesn't pass the common sense test. Not to say that GoDaddy isn't engaging in this selective DNS blackout policy, just that it's not because of a underinvestment in their infrastructure.
That makes a lot more sense. It would be a lot better if the DNS provider said something like, "First million DNS entries served is free, after that, we charge you $0.50/million queries" (Amazon pricing for DNS)
Then, you respond to every request as fast as you can. (Note, this also provides an incentive to the customer to jack up the TTL on the resource records, so 99.99% of the requests are handled at the caching servers instead of GoDaddy)
Some proof would be nice here. I almost thought having some proof after using Watchmouse DNS Analysis on a Godaddy DNS hosted domain: http://www.watchmouse.com/en/dnstool.php?varghost=cheapdomai... , and hit some 'No response' from multiple locations. But some Watchmouse test locations always reply with 'No response' (Amsterdam3-Netherlands; Belgrade-Serbia; Budapest-Hungary; Frankfurt-Germany; Lille-France; Madrid-Spain; Novosibirsk-Russia; San Francisco-U.S.A.; Sofia-Bulgaria).
Any other good DNS tool that queries from multiple GEO locations?
You don't buy DNS service from Godaddy, you buy registration. The DNS service is a courtesy.
For all this article states here's much more likely what's happening:
1. People are using the "free DNS service" for high traffic sites rather than rolling their own or buying a paid DNS service. Then setting their TTLs to 1 hour to make changes easier.
2. Godaddy is paying real $$ to host DNS for all those domains and in some cases could be revenue negative on a domain because of it. Regardless of how cheap you think DNS hosting is, Godaddy makes $3-4/year or less on a domain registration.
3. Godaddy is responding by throttling sources of extreme (possibly automated) DNS query traffic.
The author is someone going to the cheapest registrar and complaining that the complimentary serivces have limits. Once those limits are found he is trying to paint a "cheap/greedy corporation" picture. If the author is looking to write about underinvestment in infrastructure, he should consider an autobiography.
Whether it's R. Scott Perry or GoDaddy's PR flack who're confusing DNS with WHOIS data, I'm not sure.
I've encountered throttle limits on WHOIS queries from numerous registrars, going back years. In the normal course of events, it's not necessary to query WHOIS a whole lot, but some legitimate uses (spam and other forms of abuse fighting, for example) are ... expediated somewhat by access to, say, contact information for a given network.
Some years ago I investigated caching whois clients and found jwhois to be reasonably good (it presumes information about whois servers which isn't always accurate) and both greatly speeds up response times and reduces repeat requests for a given entity.
I'm still confused why would anyone want to by their domain name from GoDaddy, after all this press they get. It looks like a horrible company in general (not just this story) and everyone giving them money just helps them suck more. If I could see they are improving, then a current suckiness can be forgiven, but when actually getting worse?
Domains are a commodity, and $7.69 for a domain (after applying one of the widely-available coupons) is the lowest price in the industry. If someone registers many domains, this adds up quickly.
I think it's more name recognition. Nearly all of my freelance clients who bought their own domain name for a new venture used Godaddy. Why? Because it's the only domain registrar they've ever heard of.
They don't know about Godaddy's bad press or it's upselling techniques. They just know they saw a superbowl ad saying "need a domain name? use godaddy"
There is the explanation. That is the point. GoDaddy ram their cheap price down the public's throat by TV, magazine and online advertising.
If people see an advert and decide they might want the product at that price then look at some other site to compare and see a higher price, most won't ask.
In my book, that makes them about as slimy as GoDaddy.
It's one thing if you're a huge-volume customer or have unique needs, but companies that have two price lists -- one for the far more efficient (for BOTH parties) online sales channel, and a lower one for the human-intervention sales channel, just disgust me.
You get that everywhere in media buys, and yes, a large segment of people interacting on the web—the ones who don’t know code—view the domain name as a media buy.
I've used GoDaddy for registrations for years, never a problem. My DNS is managed elsewhere, but for registrations I haven't had an issue with GoDaddy ever.
I continue to be amazed at how many startups (and other companies, high profile individuals, etc) rely on GoDaddy for their DNS rather than having a properly managed DNS hosting as part of their web-hosting solution.
DNS tacked on to domain registration is a throwaway after thought - certainly for GoDaddy, regardless of whether this 'blackout' is true or not.
I moved away from GoDaddy years ago. They have proven themselves to be irrationally self-interested. This is just one more reason no one should use them. While the domain cost is low, ancillary costs are high: not to mention moral cost for using a company that kills Elephants for sport.
The elephant was attacking a town, right? It was going to be killed in defense anyway. The town managed to sell "kill rights" to a rich idiot, good for them.
What do you guys use instead of GoDaddy? Just interested to see what others prefer out there. I was gonna do a domain transfer to GoDaddy, but after reading this I won't be considering them.
I've been using namecheap for years. Never had any problems with them. They are reasonably priced and fast to respond. The only thing I don't like is their slightly confusing interface. Hiring an UX engineer and giving him free reign wouldn't hurt them :)
There are multiple threads on HN already answering your question, you can find them via the search function. (This comment is not meant to cry "double post", just as a pointer for your to look for more information on GoDaddy alternatives).
I've been using Gandi for years now and I really like them. But since I've never never had a problem, I really can't comment on their customer service.
I second Gandi - I transferred to them from Dotster for many reasons and the service is excellent - not to mention the free SSL certificates with your domain purchase, which has come in handy a few times.
I transferred from GoDaddy to name.com about a year ago by recommendation of a friend. It's nice to not be bombarded with GD babes and just enter my account to do what I need to do.
I wish I hadn't switched to name.com. If you use their DNS servers they automatically add a wildcard record pointing to a parking page. There is no way of turning that off besides defining your own bogus wildcard record.
I keep getting emails about expiring domains and auto-renewals. I maintain a separate spread-sheet to keep track of these.
For some reason it not only annoys me but it always make my blood pressure shoot up. To turn these alerts off you have to disable auto-renew for the domain. This check box is not easy to find. They hide the auto-renew check box column very cleverly.
Now I get emails about expiring other services... I still haven't figured how to turn these off.
I guess since I've been using them so long I'm in the same boat, I know exactly where to go. You can even go straight to your domain manager by visiting dcc.godaddy.com -- quick and easy.
Straightforward hosting too. I use them simply for 301'ing requests to my root domain to my dub-dub-dub site, that being hosted on Amazon S3. The pay as you go approach to that makes it very cost effective.
After you buy a domain from anywhere set your nameservers to point to cloudflare. They also have a reverse proxy/caching service that is useful. They have a video on their webpage that explains some of what they do.
I use dnsimple (http://dnsimple.com). It's not one of the cheaper ones (US$3/month for DNS hosting up to ten domains, US$14/registration), but it has a nice UI, JSON REST API and support that doesn't suck.
My first website was a combo package from them, which included a domain name.
When I had my own server and tried to transfer the domain there was no way for me to get them to release the domain name.
If I cancel my hosting account, then I would have to wait until the domain expires and becomes available again, so that I can then re-register it with another registrar, was their reply.
No matter what I tried I couldn't get them to let me transfer the domain name away from them or even update the nameservers to make it point to the new server.
Things surely have changed by now but because of their policy I lost a well established domain name, so that I haven't touched their services ever since.
Not just no, HELL no. Enom is almost worse than godaddy in some ways, especially when it comes to transfers. They will hold you down for the maximum amount of time they can before actually processing a transfer. I've had to deal with their support more than once because of a XFR being stuck in their process somewhere.
They're also a huge reseller. I'd rather deal with a tier 1 provider instead of one 2 or 3 links down the chain.
I know quite a few ops and abuse folks at godaddy who have root or enable, but this doesn't seem substantiated enough for me to even waste their time with.
The title is linkbait. There is no such official policy that we know of or that this bloggers knows of. This person is making a supposition, at best.
tldr: The new owners of GoDaddy have decided to block DNS traffic rather then invest in their infrastructure to handle the additional load. See also: bridges, roads, wireless carriers.
tldr addendum: because they want to push back some of the 99% of registered sites that use the free DNS service yet drive huge amounts of traffic and want them to upgrade to DNS Premium support.
Yeah, I did, but I accidentally included information from the "GoDaddy response" linked by rednaught. If you didn't read the 2nd link, then I understand how it sounds wrong. In retrospect, I should have replied to rednaught's post.
I like how he uses mostly POSH [1] for his markup. Too bad he must appeal to something like the H4 element in order to include the author's name and the publication date.
It is difficult to understand that an academic such as Berners-Lee came up with prominently article-oriented HTML and did not include an AUTHOR tag or DATE tag.
It is a technical point, in a technical forum. It is fairly common for HNers to comment, say, on the CSS technology used in an article about the US deficit, and they are generally not downvoted or scolded. Similarly, my comment is that the author essentially appeals to no CSS at all.
You really don't get this? People comment on the css when it interesting and you can learn from it. Saying someone didn't use css is not interesting at all.
It's not a design page, it's not an html tutorial, it's an article on DNS, the html and css make difference at all.
Try to answer (in your mind) the question: "So what?" to both your posts. Merely raising a point isn't really enough - there has to be a reason to raise it.
Since this is no longer about my comment, but rather about me, let me open my response by saying that what I really don't get is what drove you to consider my uniniteresting comment worthy of your time and words, instead of simply downvoting it, just as many people did (some upvoted, though!).
Merely raising a point isn't really enough - there has to be a reason to raise it.
My point, in case it was not clear, is that there is merit and elegance to not using CSS at all. It is (arguably!) the purest way of exalting content: forgetting completely about presentational aspects. My point, maybe not well explained first, is that it is noteworthy to see this kind of choice in 2011 by a tech-savvy author. It may not be interesting to you, but it is for more than one person. See, e.g., [1], [2].
I accept this may not be interesting to you, and even to most HNers. Rest assured that if (and only if) I find an overwhelming proof of the latter, I will avoid this kind of comment in the future. But, for the love of Ken, don't even try to take ownership of as subjective a concept as "interesting". Heck, an article on anything at all on HN brings up well-received comments on ping times, DNS servers, JS file delivery, etc. and, um, that may have nothing to do with the content of the article itself. That's one of the main reasons I, for one, love HN.
I did not downvote your comment, and I replied because I felt bad for you. You didn't seem (and still don't) to get what was wrong with your comment.
Your comments about css etc are perfectly fine, and interesting, in an of themself - but not in the context of that article. In the context of that article they were off topic.
Your reply indicates that you think that if the topic is interesting at all (your footnotes) then it can be placed anywhere, and that is not so. Comments need to stay on topic to the article they are attached to. It would be one thing if the topic were css and you were brining up a side note. But this article was about dns, css was not on anyone else's mind.
I appreciate your clarification. For what is worth, I personally don’t use downvoting at all (except by accident!): I simply don’t upvote.
Now, please bear in mind that while you just replied
Your comments about css etc are perfectly fine, and interesting, in an of themself - but not in the context of that article. In the context of that article they were off topic.
you previously stated
People comment on the css when it interesting and you can learn from it. Saying someone didn't use css is not interesting at all.
I was obviously replying to the latter.
Let me emphasize a point you’re not addressing. Even though vote counts are gone, relative positioning of comments give you an idea of what HN as a community deems interesting. Clearly my original comment was not considered enlightening, engaging, nor for that matter inappropriate. But, again, plenty of popular comments are decidedly off topic with respect to the article’s content: DNS, webserver used, whois information, ping times, JS usage, accessibility, color choice, cookies, character encoding, HTML semantics, etc.
But that’s the thing: the moment you provide a URL in HN, many aspects that go way beyond the actual content are generally not considered off topic. Whether that is right or wrong, whether this means “not getting it” are, in my opinion, entirely pointless mental exercises. Clearly, as soon as this changes significantly I will heed the cue and adjust, possibly looking for venues where this “off-topic” chatter is deemed acceptable and even fun.
In any event, thanks again for clarifying your point. Cheers.
A further note: Also if you use an external monitoring service(e.g. Pingdom, Wormly, Exactstate) that performs DNS traversals for each check instead of relying on a recursive server, this likely explains any increase in false alarms.
Yeah, after I read your comment I recheck my Pingdom's logs, those weird timeout errors since one year ago are now gone (I've switched to CloudFlare). Back then I was scratching my head wondering why Pingdom generated so much errors from random different locations while people reported that they were able to access my sites jut fine. Thanks!
I am a happy Gandi.net customer but I had never heard of this! Looking back it's mentioned in the renewal confirmation email "Did you know? Since February 20th 2009, when you create a domain name at Gandi, you also benefit from a standard Gandi SSL certificate for one year!" but of course I didn't pay much attention to those.
The fine print for the SSL certificate is "Included for free the first year with the purchase, transfer, or renewal of your domain name. €12 euros excl. vat per year for its renewal. Offer valid until December 31st, 2011."
Prices are not static things. Namecheap isn't always $10 and GoDaddy isn't always $50. In fact, GoDaddy charges $12 for SSL certs right now with a coupon you'll find on any coupon site.
For registrars, the margins are basically non-existant, low cost + high volume is where they're all already at.
For .com domains, Verisign charge all registrars $7.34 per registration (going up to $7.85 in January 2012), so when you consider GoDaddy charge $11.99 (less with various offers), it's not a big margin business.
I tallied up all the votes in a HN thread about registrars and settled on NearlyFreeSpeech.net. Their payment system is weird (you fund your pool of money from which charges are deducted), but otherwise it was quick, painless, and not full of creepy, sexualized imagery and cheesy, repetitive upselling techniques.
GoDaddy is a bit cheaper if you spend the time to scrounge up coupon codes, but wow, NearlyFreeSpeech was the first time my domain registrar's website didn't give me a headache.
It's a shame, HN used to function as a super high quality recommendation resource for startup services like this. Now after they removed comment scores not so much, or at least not as easily.
I once ended up in a ... discusssion ... with the owner of nfs.net about deployment of certain open source projects I'm involved with. It didn't end well, due to a couple of early misunderstandings that we failed to resolve before the conversation went of the rails.
As such, I don't think I'd ever want to be a customer of theirs.
However, I -do- believe that their service is competently delivered and extremely cost effective; every other user I've ever spoken to has been entirely happy, so I've put my own experience down to a combination of personality conflict and bad luck, and am happy to say their service is likely one very much worth considering if you fall into any of the markets they target.
Usually that kind of payment system is there to avoid having to pay significant per-transaction fees, which are especially onerous for low-priced stuff.
People honestly use GoDaddy for anything other than domain names? NEVER use the same company to host your DNS as you registered your domain with. At that point you're pretty much putting all your eggs in one basket.
This article doesn't pass the common sense test. Not to say that GoDaddy isn't engaging in this selective DNS blackout policy, just that it's not because of a underinvestment in their infrastructure.