Live data from Hacker News

Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

txti.es

71–80 of 433 posts

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is a problem when you talk about fear of ideas. You can label anyone as a Nazi today, and when you ban people, you kinda give them power. It shows you're afraid of their ideas, and the persecution can embolden them or give them a sense of legitimacy. It can being the Streisand Effect to their cause, taking a no-name site no one knew or cared about and blowing it up into something everyone is deeply aware o…

>and when you ban people, you kinda give them power. The key word being "kinda". You give the perception of power, but there are plenty of things in society we deal with by a form of "banning" (such as incarceration) in which we judge the ban to be good regardless of the power it gives people, or the ideas they represent or practice. Locking up child abusers, for instance, may give the spectre of child abuse power, a…

>I don't know anyone who wouldn't be afraid of a Nazi-style dictatorship

Do you believe that if people with ideas that you consider to be Nazi-like are allowed participate in the public debate as freely and meaningfully as everyone else (e.g. by using electronic services regularly available to everyone else), a Nazi-style dictatorship is likely to come about?

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#72

Is it really all that surprising when a big company that claims to be good but hosts phishing content in the name of free speech does whatever they want, including breaking things and not explaining why? I don't trust Cloudflare one bit, and I think everyone should question whether their attempt to re-centralize everything is beneficial to the planet. There are two major problems here: one, the problem itself, which…

IMHO (and I know the parent post includes significant difficulties getting back out of Cloudflare), services like Cloudflare may be crucial to decentralization. I can't deal with something like my blog post being frontpaged on HN if my website is hosted in my house, unless I have a good CDN. As a self-hosting enthusiast, something like Cloudflare is one of the best chances of having a plan that competes with "just ho…

I don't know. Sure, maybe not on your barely-broadband DSL connection, but I'm pretty sure you can run most things on a average shared webhosting, even if you're using WP. You just need to make sure that you have a working caching system in place. It's a gigantic difference even on an apache to just read & send a plain file and invoke PHP & run all the costly code. I don't believe HN should bring down any site that can essentially be cached as static HTML.

Cloudflare will only help once your server has gone down with their "Always On" thingy, if you have that enabled. They don't cache HTML by default.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#73

My takeaway: 1. Setup up monitoring on your critical domains. UptimeRobot and Hetrixtools are good starters with generous free tier. You should know when your website/email/dns isn't working. 2. Don't tie your domain registration with your DNS provider. You lose everything if something goes wrong with your account. 3. Be able to jump ship easily, have backups of your zone, already know where you will transfer to.

> UptimeRobot and Hetrixtools are good starters with generous free tier Are there any open source status pages/monitor programs that have build-in checks for HTTPS, DNS records (ipv4/6), arbitrary port checks, etc? I'd rather just setup a status page/alert app on a $5 minimal DO/Vultr node and self-host/support/contribute to a FOSS program than use a commercial provider.

If you want email or text message alerts I would assume that's a complicated enough system you would want uptime alerts on it, and so on recursively ad infinitum.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#74

My takeaway: 1. Setup up monitoring on your critical domains. UptimeRobot and Hetrixtools are good starters with generous free tier. You should know when your website/email/dns isn't working. 2. Don't tie your domain registration with your DNS provider. You lose everything if something goes wrong with your account. 3. Be able to jump ship easily, have backups of your zone, already know where you will transfer to.

> UptimeRobot and Hetrixtools are good starters with generous free tier Are there any open source status pages/monitor programs that have build-in checks for HTTPS, DNS records (ipv4/6), arbitrary port checks, etc? I'd rather just setup a status page/alert app on a $5 minimal DO/Vultr node and self-host/support/contribute to a FOSS program than use a commercial provider.

check out https://github.com/hunterlong/statping - thats what i'm using.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#75
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Setup up monitoring on your critical domains. UptimeRobot and Hetrixtools are good starters with generous free tier. You should know when your website/email/dns isn't working. Lesson learned :) > Don't tie your domain registration with your DNS provider. You lose everything if something goes wrong with your account. I don't see how that helps. How do I recover from my registrar deleting/disabling my account even if…

>I don't see how that helps. How do I recover from my registrar deleting/disabling my account even if DNS is somewhere else? I think there's still only one failure point and the lesson is that I need to pay that failure point more money. Your outage was a DNS outage, not a registrar outage. If you still had control of the domain you could update your name servers to another provider, import your backed up records and…

> Your outage was a DNS outage, not a registrar outage. If you still had control of the domain you could update your name servers to another provider, import your backed up records and get the site back online without talking to CloudFlare.

I believe it was both.

If I have a registrar outage I'm hosed. If I don't have a registrar outage and do have a DNS outage I can recover with a little work. But in the only case I can recover my registrar was reliable, so why didn't I just have them do DNS as well?

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#76

Be wary of being part of something that is a cost center for the company instead of a profit center. CloudFlare is selling domains at cost. That means they are not making any money from being a domain registrar, which means they will do everything to keep the cost of doing it as low possible to themselves. This means lack of customer service and use of ML dragnets for "anomalous" behavior.

.com has a price floor of $7.85. Most registrars seem to target anywhere from the $9.99 - $14.99 range for registration because, as far as I can tell, there is no real differentiation outside of price.

Sure, I could spend $lots to get a dedicated account rep from MarkMonitor or CSC but that's not really feasible for my personal site.

Are there really any registrars that hit a reasonable price point for individuals and offer service beyond bargain basement? Because if so I'm doing some transfers this weekend.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#77
FWIW I recently evaluated a few DNS companies after Namecheap ballsed up our MX records in a similar way.

I actively looked for someone we could pay money to, so we are their customer (as opposed to being a free tier user, effectively a cost)

The winner was DNSimple[1], who do exactly 1 thing, and they do it extremely well. And they are small enough to not take themselves too seriously[2], which I really appreciate.

Oh and their normal support channel is email, and everyone in the company takes a turn. I tested out their support before signing up and quickly heard back from a competent engineer, so they passed that test too.

[1] https://dnsimple.com [2] https://dnsimple.com/dnsound <— bonkers

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#78

This is frightening. I just started the process of moving all ~60 of my domains from Amazon Registrar + Google Cloud DNS to Cloudflare, and will definitely wait until somebody from Cloudflare chimes in here to clarify what's going on.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket, ie. don't just use one provider.

Also for your core domains, do not let the registrar and dns provider be the same entity.

Also, don't decide on not migrating just because of one bad experience. None of them are perfect, though vigilance is wise.

(I know am probably preaching to the choir :) )

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#79

Cloudflare once deleted one of my domains because the NS records were set in the wrong order.

What do you mean by wrong order? Do you mean the NS records in the zone file were after a delegation / referral? What RFC was your zone breaking?

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#80
post #53

Cloudflare lost my support when they started de-platforming people for holding opinions they didn't agree with. Censorship outside of strictly legal bounds should not be tolerated from a company as powerful as Cloudflare.

Why do you think you have a right to host with them? You don’t, you have a privilege that’s extended by them. You’re welcome to host your own thing somewhere else.

>You don’t

You don't now.

Why do successful technology companies have a right to have a proportionally large influence on the public political debate? Is it good for society to allow successful technology companies to have such a large degree of control over something so incredibly vital, merely because they were effective at running a particular type of business?

Post reply on HN