OpenSolaris VPS

Today, we've had a fairly large DNS outage. As some of you might be aware of, we host our DNS over at EveryDNS.com. It was free (well, we donated, and have supported it's cause through advertising on their site). It has served fairly well for the last several years, with only a few occasional DoS attacks.

Our LDAP address book (LDAPBook), mail and web site services were down. No doubt there would've been some access issues to our OpenSolaris VPS servers. Some of our customer's websites who also use EveryDNS were down.

We've taken DNS for granted.

One of the main reasons we've outsourced DNS is that we did not want to manage yet another service in-house. This is one of those things better left outsourced, leaving us free to concentrate on our core competencies - LDAP and OpenSolaris VPS.

We're investigating our options. We are considering using DynDNS, but one thing bothers us. This note on their web site:

Important note: Custom DNS cannot function if nameservers other than our nsX.mydyndns.org servers are listed in the delegation. Having "foreign" nameservers listed will prevent Custom DNS from initially activating, and later adding these extraneous nameservers will cause the service to deactivate within two weeks of the change. Please ensure only our five nameservers are listed in the delegation.

We do have secondary DNS servers in-house, and using that would be out of the question, since it seems we'll be forced to use only DynDNS name servers. This also brings up a point of what happens if DynDNS is DDoS attacked, since we'll be locked with one provider. However, DynDNS seems much more active in the DNS community (more than EveryDNS seems to have been), and they have real active support, which EveryDNS lacked. The pricing also seem to be quite high, we have over 30 domains (of which 10 are critical to our business) with EveryDNS and $30/year is about $900. DynDNS did offer to host our EveryDNS domains for free, for one year. But, after?

It's time to pick a provider that is flexible, and possibly not so expensive. We haven't ruled out DynDNS, but we haven't also jumped into the boat yet. We've taken DNS for granted, when DNS should be the most important infrastructure service. We'll change that...

zerigo.com looks interesting.