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My domain registrar (DNSimple) tried to 5x the cost of my reseller plan

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51–59 of 59 posts

Re: My domain registrar (DNSimple) tried to 5x the cost of my reseller plan

#51
post #48

Founder and CEO of DNSimple here. I'd like to clarify a couple of things about our business that may shed some light on why we've ended certain legacy plans when we have. There are two key parts to our business: domain registration management and authoritative DNS. These two parts have very different price models in the industry. For domains, you pay a fee for each year they are registered. For DNS, you pay for each…

> rising prices of infrastructure What does this refer to? (It sounds like servers, and those are certainly not getting more expensive.)

We run a combination of managed hardware and virtual hardware. The prices for both have indeed gone up significantly since we launched some of our earliest plans. We don't have the luxury of using a cloud provider like AWS for our Anycast DNS infrastructure, thus we are limited to our choices. Furthermore the cost for network transit has gone up, as has the cost of ancillary services we use to operate our network (such as tooling for alerting, observability, etc).

Re: My domain registrar (DNSimple) tried to 5x the cost of my reseller plan

#52

I'm curious why they didn't communicate with DNSimple about the price hike. From the way this blog is written, it sounds like he didn't try to communicate with them at all, but instead chose to just walk away.

We emailed back and forth several times. CEO was on the thread, was aware of my concerns, chose not to do anything. The result of the back-and-forth was the proposal I shared in the post.

Re: My domain registrar (DNSimple) tried to 5x the cost of my reseller plan

#54

Is there any feature there that is unique enough you can't use AWS or GCP? I use GCP for all my DNS needs and it's very very cheap.

They have a feature called ALIAS records, which is a non-standard DNS record type similar to CNAME, but it works with the root domain. The people I know using DNSimple were using it because it worked better with Heroku than other DNS providers at the time. They are not the only ones offering ALIAS records now, but it's still a non-standard feature that not every DNS provider has. A feature like this is needed for Her…

GCP has ALIAS records in preview as of somewhat recently: https://cloud.google.com/dns/docs/records-overview#alias-rec...

Re: My domain registrar (DNSimple) tried to 5x the cost of my reseller plan

#55
post #48

Founder and CEO of DNSimple here. I'd like to clarify a couple of things about our business that may shed some light on why we've ended certain legacy plans when we have. There are two key parts to our business: domain registration management and authoritative DNS. These two parts have very different price models in the industry. For domains, you pay a fee for each year they are registered. For DNS, you pay for each…

[flagged]

Re: My domain registrar (DNSimple) tried to 5x the cost of my reseller plan

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my *personal* experience, the target audience, to a large degree, doesn't care at all about owning domains, websites or servers. They want something that just works and the less they have to deal with technology, the better. In that sense, a reasonable and ethical service where you own nothing is much better than one that preys on you and you still own nothing.

People want the thing whose functioning they are largely ignorant of to just be solved by someone else already, news at eleven. It is, I feel, the responsibility of those who do know how these things work (e.g. us) to point out which things are important and which are safely dumped onto someone else. In this case, one’s identity on the ’net is very important, and something one should absolutely not put into position…

At least I know there's one person that gets it.

I've never ran into such brigading on HN before. I really thought I said something non-confrontational at first.

Wait till they get hit with their first domain renewal sniping attack. Then it's spiderman-pointy-finger meme all day when explaining who hurt who.

Re: My domain registrar (DNSimple) tried to 5x the cost of my reseller plan

#57

I like using OVH for domains and its quite simple to manage / order domains with their API.

I used ovh for ~8 years, but it's getting more and more unstable ( not sure if only the web UI or their structure) Domain registrations don't get through and must validate manually (no new customer and always paid invoices), especially if you buy friday and you must wait until monday)

Updating DNS records sometimes don't work (random webui errors, sometimes even in french)

Re: My domain registrar (DNSimple) tried to 5x the cost of my reseller plan

#58
post #4

I'm wondering what prevented the author from having the sales call and seeing what rates they are willing to offer. Best case they might even be better than the current rates.

I'm allergic to sales calls. =] Plus, when has jumping on a "quick call with sales"[1] ever resulted in paying less money? [1] posthog.com/sales

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Re: My domain registrar (DNSimple) tried to 5x the cost of my reseller plan

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare handles domain registration at no price markup, the UX is solid once you figure out the slightly quirky process, and transfers have gone smoothly.

My issue with the Cloudflare registrar is that if you are using Cloudflare for DNS too, you’ve basically given them control over your domain. Yes, they don’t need the DNS part to redirect your domain to a different address, but you’re putting more eggs in the same basket. If you also use their hosting (pages or workers), you’ve given them full control over the entire project. I prefer to use the latter options, witho…

The registrar has control over your domain regardless of where you host DNS, since they could change your nameservers if they felt like it (or perhaps by accident). True I doubt a company like Cloudflare would do this (there would be huge repercussions), but it's nonetheless true that your registrar does hold all your eggs no matter what other decisions you make.
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