metacard.com hosting service fiasco redux

[Ben Rubinstein]

on 4/4/02 5:32 AM, Scott Raney at raney at metacard.com wrote:

> ... have taken several precautions to make sure we don't get caught
> out like this again.  The most significant of these is to move DNS
> hosting back to our local servers.  We had done this for most of the
> time since we first registered the domain, but transfered the domain
> records to Jumpline when we became the target of various DNS-based
> attacks on our local servers and decided that we couldn't be trusted
> to keep up with the patches required to maintain a secure network.

For those who aren't in a position to do this, I strong recommend EasyDNS
<www.easyDNS.com> (there are some other similar services - these happen to
be the ones we started using - because the person researching liked the
soothing colours of the web site! - and they've proven an excellent choice).
You might think of it as "pobox for web sites".

They don't do anything except DNS, so they're pretty good at it and there's
no reason they should go bust.  They're exceptionally strong on customer
service - but mostly you shouldn't need it.  You get an easy to use, but
complete, web control panel to set DNS parameters on your domain (and up to
100 sub-domains), and options like URL forwarding and mail spool.  There is
documentation to help explain all the options.  In most cases they can
initialise it with the current settings from your ISP, so switching over is
usually painless.  The service is cheap and works great.  Most of our sites
are hosted by third party ISPs, and since in seven years we've never found
one that was competent, I started sleeping a lot easier when I finally got
DNS on all our domains moved over to EasyDNS.  If the ISP goes down or
suffers an outage for more than a few hours, I can quickly repoint the site
to a temporary or backup site on one of our own servers.  When our mail
server ran out of disk space last weekend, EasyDNS took up the strain (you
can set their spool server as a secondary, and it will keep mail for up to
five days).  And when I have a fight with an ISP, I know that the most I can
lose is the cost of my current contract - I don't rely on their cooperation,
or competence, to move the site.

Enough promotion: suffice it to say that if you have at least one domain
that you care about, and don't run your own DNS (or do, but would like a
backup) then unless you love and respect your ISP, I really recommend an
extra $20/year to keep the DNS out of their hands.

(No connection with the company except as a very happy customer.)
 
  Ben Rubinstein               |  Email: benr_mc at cogapp.com
  Cognitive Applications Ltd   |  Phone: +44 (0)1273-821600
  http://www.cogapp.com        |  Fax  : +44 (0)1273-728866