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How a domain registrar can kill your business

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Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#151

Post by lallysingh »

smallbigfish wrote: post #68
mhkool wrote: post #53

I recommend using easydns.com as the registrar and DNS service. Their email helpdesk is fast: And yeah, you need to have a lot of faith to use .io or other new TLDs which are serviced by new companies.

Hmm, lots of people here recommend EasyDNS. I'm curios so I went to check. They say that the "DNS PRO" offer has 5 million queries/month. Is that a lot? Do they enforce the limit? That's 7000/requests/hour (or 115/minute or 2/second). That's not PRO in my books.

The results for DNS is cached, often by both browser and ISP resolver, so it's tough to determine the actual query rate for high traffic sites.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#152

Post by gregmac »

smallbigfish wrote: post #68
mhkool wrote: post #53

I recommend using easydns.com as the registrar and DNS service. Their email helpdesk is fast: And yeah, you need to have a lot of faith to use .io or other new TLDs which are serviced by new companies.

Hmm, lots of people here recommend EasyDNS. I'm curios so I went to check. They say that the "DNS PRO" offer has 5 million queries/month. Is that a lot? Do they enforce the limit? That's 7000/requests/hour (or 115/minute or 2/second). That's not PRO in my books.

DNS results typically get cached for at least a few minutes, and most users use ISP or public DNS servers (eg, Google, CloudFlare, etc) which only do the lookup once for many users, so your authoritative DNS server will see only a fraction of the number of web requests you actually handle. I'd guess for most sites this is probably below 1% in terms of requests per second.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#153

Post by bluedonuts »

We spend lot of time thinking about making our services resilient against failure at the infrastructure level yet the domain registrar is often overlooked.

Not only do you have to worry about them making a technical mistake there is also the risk of a phishing attack.

A while back I did a bit of research about what was the most reliable registrar and the only one that i could find was Markmonitor. Most of the big sites (google.com facebook.com etc) use them. They offer lots of cool features that i had never heard of like registrar level locking and custom 'protocols' (like a phonecall from X no. of authorised people) to validate a change. Plus some others that seemed less interesting (to me) such as the brand protection.

They do of course charge a pretty penny. From memory there was a minimum cost of $30k per year which allowed you pretty much as many domains as you might want and the promise of being able to get ahold of a human if something goes wrong.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#154

Post by namibj »

djsumdog wrote: post #72
daxorid wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is no guarantee. GoDaddy and Google Domains, in particular, have demonstrated willingness to throw you into clientHold hell for political reasons, even for "tried and true TLDs".

I remember last year how Google, GoDaddy and CloudFlair all threw this one website under the bus: https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-... The Internet isn't as free as people think it is. Things still need to be hosts and those providers could simply chose to stop hosting you.

I'm pretty sure you can find a DC at either AMS-IX or DE-CIX where the contract won't allow them to kick you out during the politically heated time (i.e. you should find somewhere with a 1y+ term), and iirc both exchanges have, due to their non-profit nature, no ability to kick you out unless your actions are actually illegal. So, unless you get shut down by a court of law (both host countries have them (well, almost, but compared to the US they are great)), you get sufficient bandwidth at those providers. Ofc eyeball networks can blackhole you w.r.t. their customers, but that is a whole different hurdle compared to just refusing to do business on the basis of freedom of contract/freedom of association. Sure it will cost you, about $6k/month for 100Gbits, not including hardware and rackspace. But if you are 'just' concerned with your static website staying online on the clearnet, this should be affordable (i.e., you should be able to host them from ram, and serve up to 600Gbit/s from a 1U AMD Epyc, for like $7k in hardware, not counting the ram (15$/GiB of content you want to host, with a minimum of 32GiB, up to 512GiB getting a discount, and up to 2TiB being possible)).

Don't depend critically on companies risking political alignment with you, if what you do has any significant risk due to political association.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#155

Post by gpm »

mkopinsky wrote: post #143
user5994461 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally found a period of 1-2 year to be the absolute worst. On the next cycle the man is gone because it's past the average tenure. The emails about it were lost or auto deleted. Any documentation or process is useless because the company or the supplier has changed. To have a process be remembered, make it monthly or quarterly.

How can you make domain renewals be monthly or quarterly?

If you have multiple domains you could renew them at seperate times.

Has the advantage that a failure might not be so disastrous either.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#156

Post by matte_black »

jacquesm wrote: post #121
matte_black wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They got lucky, because if it were me and I left on mild terms I would be invoicing them $50k a year to renew their domain.

You are lucky, because if I ran that company I'd haul your ass in court so quick you wouldn't know what hit you. The fact that you can doesn't give you a right to do so and in this case it is pretty clear that you would be acting maliciously. I've seen such 'tricks' up close a couple of times and judges tend to take a very dim view of this kind of behavior.

Good luck proving I have any connection to the company in the foreign country sending you the invoice.

Also, if payment isn’t received within 30 days you can expect to see the domain forwarded to a “for sale” page.

And given how fast the legal system moves especially across international borders, you will lose hundreds of millions in revenue before getting any kind of verdict, possibly even go bankrupt.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#157

Post by pasbesoin »

MiddleEndian wrote: post #81
jtl999 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I note my domains expiration dates and renew them at least 30 days before. Your not the only person whose had issues recently with Namecheap not sending renewal emails.

I have the opposite issue with namecheap. I have my domains on auto-renew, and every time they're about to be due for their renewal, namecheap sends me a scary email saying I don't have the funds to renew, and only the next day do they auto-renew my domain.

I had that happen with them, when I first finally decided to trust their system to save my credit card information and turned on autorenew. Support told me it was/is because I have a couple of dollar balance with them from years and years ago, back when something involved making a transfer payment to my balance with them and then executing against that balance.

If you have autorenew set, it first tries to draw against any existing positive balance you have directly with Namecheap. If/when that doesn't work, it then next tries your preferred payment method (e.g. your registered and designated preferred credit card).

I was told if I found a way to clear my couple of buck balance with Namecheap, I'd no longer get the warning email. The first attempt would be against my credit card, which would work, and I'd just get one success email (after preceding "upcoming" emails and all that).

I don't know whether this is correct. It's what I was told by support over chat, IIRC.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#158

Post by amatecha »

matte_black wrote: post #109
davidgh wrote: post #92

I recall a time when a company I had association with lost their main domains due to a failed renewal. In this case it was a long-term employee who left the company that had loads of company bills going to his card. He cancelled the card sometime after he left and the domains were not renewed. I’m not sure where the renewal failure emails were going but probably some unmonitored admin email box. These were very impor…

They got lucky, because if it were me and I left on mild terms I would be invoicing them $50k a year to renew their domain.

Domain name dispute resolution policies would find in the company's favor pretty much immediately (due to their trademark rights, and your registration with bad-faith intent), so they'd get it back reasonably quickly one way or the other. :P

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#160

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

mhkool wrote: post #53

I recommend using easydns.com as the registrar and DNS service. Their email helpdesk is fast: And yeah, you need to have a lot of faith to use .io or other new TLDs which are serviced by new companies.

I generally avoid metered services where cheap unmetered alternatives are available.

First of all, 5 million DNS requests sounds like very little. It probably isn't due to caching, but it's hard for me to judge what I need/whether that's enough.

Second, what happens when someone who doesn't like me decides to make 5 million DNS requests? 5 million packets sounds like something a decent connection might be able to fire out in a few seconds. If I pick their highest plan, will a person that has a grudge and a fast link capable of IP spoofing cost me $2/second (theoretically $5M/month, although I'm sure they'd show some mercy at that point)?

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