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DNS Outage at DigitalOcean

status.digitalocean.com

61–70 of 125 posts

Re: DNS Outage at DigitalOcean

#62
post #22

Their status page at https://status.digitalocean.com is also now giving an intermittent "500 Internal Server Error" nginx error, probably from the load. That's why you should use a service like https://www.statuspage.io for your important stuff, even though creating a status page is a fun side-project for a dev team.

But who monitors the status of statuspage.io?

Re: DNS Outage at DigitalOcean

#63
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I work we use Rotue53. For my personal domains I just use my registrar, Namecheap.

For us, Route53 is painful. We host a few thousand zones, and due to rate limiting on APIs, doing something like "Show a list of domain names" or "Give all the domains matching some pattern" were particularly painful. Upwards of 30 seconds to do a simple list of domains meant we were forced to cache locally. A local cache, combined with the fact that zone names are not unique in their system (possible to create multi…

You can contact amazon to get rate limits increased if you have the use case

Re: DNS Outage at DigitalOcean

#64
One thing hosting providers could do better would be to split the risk a little by not handing the same dns server name to every client that chooses to have the hosting provider supply dns services.

The reason this might have some upside is that DDOS attacks against a specific DNS server are often intended to target one specific customer of a hosting provider. The attacker doesn't care about the side effects...just the original target.

Say, for example "controversialblog.com" is hosted on DO, and uses DO dns servers. The person attacking "controversialblog.com" looks up the NS records for the domain, and attacks that DNS server. The fact that it's one hostname that serves all of DO is of little interest to the attacker.

So, if DO would come up with say, 10 separate hostnames they could hand out, then this sort of thing would take down 10% of their customers instead of 100%.

Re: DNS Outage at DigitalOcean

#65

Yeah this is pretty unfortunate. We have some big investor meetings today and this unfortunately took our marketing site offline. Hopefully they resolve this soon - it's the first time we've ever experienced an issue with their service. We really need fail-overs in place...small team problems.

We feel the pain as well as our platform is unreachable. I'm now using an other DNS server and changed the nameserver in the domain-record. However the DNS propagation is taking some time. What are you doing at the moment as fail-over?

We just switched it over to Route53 and set up some fail-overs there. Took us 5 mins and we're back online.

Looks like DO is still offline so it seems to have been a good call...

Re: DNS Outage at DigitalOcean

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope your clients/users are as understanding and civil as you are. In the meantime, I'm going wait for post-mortem before deciding if I should continue using them for dns. Looking back over the status history, 1-2 incidents a year isn't that bad for my needs, but might be too much for you, which is fine (since I'm only hosting a couple of small side projects with them).

The problem is, for an early stage startup incidents like this are deadly. Especially since we just applied to a bunch of accelerators.

It's still entirely your fault. Something like Route53/Cloudflare is dirt cheap and crazy redundant. Don't risk your business on free/side services.

Re: DNS Outage at DigitalOcean

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope your clients/users are as understanding and civil as you are. In the meantime, I'm going wait for post-mortem before deciding if I should continue using them for dns. Looking back over the status history, 1-2 incidents a year isn't that bad for my needs, but might be too much for you, which is fine (since I'm only hosting a couple of small side projects with them).

The problem is, for an early stage startup incidents like this are deadly. Especially since we just applied to a bunch of accelerators.

You can go to your domain registrar and switch to another DNS provider (GoDaddy has their own DNS service).

Re: DNS Outage at DigitalOcean

#68
post #15

My rule: provider should do single thing: - Hosting provider - host sites - vps/cloud provider - provide VMs - domain registrar - domain related stuff, but not DNS - dns provider - host dns - second dns provider - host dns in case first dns provider fails So many DNS outages recently and all my projects are up.

Does Amazon's Route 53 count as a DNS provider, or do you treat it a hosting provider?

Re: DNS Outage at DigitalOcean

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, for an early stage startup incidents like this are deadly. Especially since we just applied to a bunch of accelerators.

The resolution is, for any app/startup/business everything is a risk and if you didn't include the edge-case of "What happens if my primary DNS nameserver goes down for my domain?" into account. Is all you can do is blame DO? If your app goes down do you have failover for that? Or do you blame your devops team?

Any small business has to manage which risks it accepts. OP got the Digital Ocean service to try and mitigate this risk to a degree. Beyond that, it becomes a question of accept risk in other aspects of product or a risk that your primary DNS server provider will fail?

The reality is, you have limited development and financial resources so you simple can’t do everything. Sure, in a vacuum, or in a larger enterprise, we’d love to manage every risk. But when we're just starting out that’s not realistic, and we do have a right to be upset at Digital Ocean's service going down while at the same time realizing that yes, ideally we would / should have had redundancy in place already.

Your question on blaming the devops team is exactly the mindset of someone who has a lot more resources than a brand new startup. In a brand new startup there IS NO devops team. If you're lucky, there is one person who does the devops work part time, balanced with a bunch of other development work he/she also does.

Re: DNS Outage at DigitalOcean

#70

Yeah this is pretty unfortunate. We have some big investor meetings today and this unfortunately took our marketing site offline. Hopefully they resolve this soon - it's the first time we've ever experienced an issue with their service. We really need fail-overs in place...small team problems.

If you are showing a demo or something, you can still navigate to your DO IP address. Of course, I don't know if other things (images, etc.) on your website also rely on their DNS.
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