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.io domains down?

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Re: .io domains down?

#82

Post by MicahWedemeyer »

aarondf wrote: post #65

Man, you think you plan for everything, and then your whole TLD just stops working. What's the best way to plan for something like this?

I'd recommend not worrying about it. You can't plan for everything and the time you spend being redundant for this (very unlikely) case is probably better spent somewhere else.

Send an email to one user asking for feedback and you will get a much better ROI than trying to plan for TLD failure.

Re: .io domains down?

#83

Post by colmmacc »

There are some things you can do to protect yourself against these kinds of problem. About 92% of DNS resolvers honour the TTL setting for the NS records from the leaf-node child-zones (e.g. the NS records you control as the owner of a domain). If your domain is reasonably popular, then that caching can help you outlast a problem with your TLDs name-servers. 2 days is a pretty common number for a cache lifetime.

Unfortunately for the 8% of resolvers that honour the TTL in the parent domain, you have less control. In this case for .io, the parent-zone NS ttls are just one hour;

  ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
  nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	ns1.communitydns.net.
  nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	b.nic.ac.
  nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	a.nic.io.
  nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	b.nic.sh.
  nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	ns4.nic.io.
  nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	dns01.cdns.net.
  nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	b.nic.io.
which I think is relatively short by TLD standards.

Another important thing to consider is that the TLD you choose for your domain itself isn't the only TLD that your domain resolution may depend upon. Resolution also depends on all of the domains of your nameservers resolving too. Route 53 assigns every hosted zone 4 nameservers from 4 different TLDs, e.g.;

  example.info.	  172800  IN	NS      ns-1834.awsdns-37.co.uk.
  example.info.	  172800  IN	NS	ns-22.awsdns-02.com.
  example.info.	  172800  IN	NS	ns-912.awsdns-50.net.
  example.info.	  172800  IN	NS	ns-1233.awsdns-26.org.
So that if any one of those TLDs has a problem it does not cause a resolution failure for your zone. Some other providers do this too, and it's also something you could set up yourself.

Full-disclosure: Route 53 engineer here.

Re: .io domains down?

#84

Post by VaibhavBehl »

davidjgraph wrote: post #64
aeden wrote: post #10

Anthony from DNSimple here. I'll pass along what I know so far: some of nic.io's name servers appear to be no longer delegating .io domains out to authoritative name servers. Some of their name servers are still delegating properly, but some are not. This issue also affects .sh and .ac TLDs I believe since they are the same registry. If I find out anything new I'll post on Twitter in the @dnsimple account and here.

ooo, you do 301 redirects, I'll be over shortly... To explain why that's useful, we have three domains, draw.io ( mutter ), diagramly.com and diagram.ly that all map to the same thing. The actual site runs on a Google App Engine appspot domain. On GAE, you have to buy a Google Apps for Business account to map a domain to an GAE appspot domain. We have three Apps accounts because of this. We're not happy to do the 301…

you can setup custom domains on google w/o the business account(using google apps standard) for free, albeit for only one user, (https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/domain)

Re: .io domains down?

#85

Post by rdl »

larsmak wrote: post #71
rdl wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate genericized ccTLDs, but I don't think the VCs are the ones who should be avoiding them. People creating services should stick to .com, get the .net, and if they have to do something like "getdropbox.com" until they can buy dropbox.com, so be it. Going from dropbox.io to dropbox.com is ok, but I'd probably go for getdropbox.com in preference to dropbox.io.

Well as a person hosting a service under a .io domain I must say that it's next to impossible to find a decent domain under .com these days. They are all taken by domain sharks hoarding away and running link-farms. The .io landscape is a refreshing one, it's well recognized by it's typical audience (tech people), expensive enough so that it's not attractive for the domain-sharks, and there's plenty available. Why exa…

1) Once you're successful you have to get the .com/.net/etc anyway. There's a lot of ambiguouty when you say "go to my site, de.lici.o.us" (which was probably the dumbest one ever), but even saying "referly" makes me think "referly.com" more than "refer.ly". If you're going to get the gccTLD, you absolutely must have sitenameio.com too. So, it doesn't really save you from "decent domain not available" -- prefixing with "get" or "my" in .com isn't any worse.

2) ccTLD has a defined meaning -- it's the country. I don't hate ccTLDs; e.g. Amazon.co.uk makes a lot of sense for the UK site of Amazon. But when people

3) They expose you to additional risk. The US can largely shut down most things, but .ly means you're exposed to Libya (JFC! an internet business voluntarily deciding to be exposed to Libya?)

4) If you really want something other than .com, you could use another TLD. Generally they all tend to be scams (I'm not aware of many .info or .biz domain names which are anything but scams, although I guess a few single-purpose/serving sites are in .info)

In fairness, IO is actually the least objectionable of all the gccTLDs, since "IO" is a pretty bogus ISO code in terms of representing a country.

ccTLDs make sense when you want to "fly the flag" of that country, too -- wikileaks.is or wikileaks.ch makes sense. All the gccTLDs have policies which are strictly worse than .com though.

And 2-letter domains (which are mostly ccTLDs) do make sense for link shorteners, particularly temporary/transient ones.

Re: .io domains down?

#87

Post by stevenklein »

alexkinch wrote: post #28

In some sort of irony, statuspage.io is down. Was looking at their offering about an hour ago and thinking of taking it for a spin, but now I'm not so sure...

Steve from StatusPage here -- an issue like this is extremely rare so we just haven't prioritized a solution for it. This is something we plan on being able to handle in the future.

Re: .io domains down?

#89

Post by alexkinch »

stevenklein wrote: post #87
alexkinch wrote: post #28

In some sort of irony, statuspage.io is down. Was looking at their offering about an hour ago and thinking of taking it for a spin, but now I'm not so sure...

Steve from StatusPage here -- an issue like this is extremely rare so we just haven't prioritized a solution for it. This is something we plan on being able to handle in the future.

Thanks Steve, agreed - just unfortunate that I only found your service earlier today, and when I went back the site was down :( Would having a custom domain have got around the problem, or is that a CNAME to your .io domain?
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