DynDNS.com Acquires EveryDNS 125
funfail writes in with the news that, five days ago, EveryDNS was sold to DynDNS.com. From the announcement and e-mail from EveryDNS's founder, David Ulevitch: "Since starting EveryDNS in June of 2001 while a freshman in college, my goal has always been to provide simple, reliable and secure DNS services to the Internet community. I'm proud to say that we've lived up to that mission and delivered robust DNS services to over 400,000 domains. Nearly 9 years later, it's now time to put the service in more capable hands and I'm happy to announce that I've found a great home for EveryDNS. I have sold the EveryDNS service to Dyn Inc., the operators of the immensely popular DynDNS.com service." EveryDNS has been one of the most popular free (or one-time donation) DNS suppliers. From the FAQ at the link above: "Will the service remain free? While we don't 100% have the answer to that yet, we will not be making any changes to the service you are currently receiving for the foreseeable future. We will be discontinuing signups in the near future but existing accounts will remain active and fully functional."
Re:Easy answer (Score:3, Insightful)
I have had a great experience as a dyndns user. I paid $30 for each of 2 customdns domains when they were still flat rate, and now I am grandfathered into them forever... can't beat that :)
Re:Easy answer (Score:4, Insightful)
DDNS is still available for free, and you can sign up. I don't recall them ever offering anything else for free.
Why you feel they should offer a free service is beyond me; its not like offering the service is free for them, and I suspect the easydns guy sold to make back the money he's invested (and them some).
There's nothing wrong with profit.
That's sad (Score:1, Insightful)
I've been using EveryDNS for a long long time. Since it started I suppose. I've given them donations year after year in hopes of avoiding this situation.
I was mostly too lazy to roll my own DNS but I guess I should start getting up to speed with the latest security fixes to bind9 or see if there's some other suitable replacement DNS server.
Re:Easy answer (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:blah @ DynDNS (Score:3, Insightful)
Question: Did you read the terms when you started using it?
Re:blah @ DynDNS (Score:2, Insightful)
About two years ago I decided to log in after ages of not touching it ... little did I know that free users must log in every three weeks or so, else the account will be dropped. By logging in I triggered their timeout service to begin.
I was checking my email one morning and found a notice that I should log into DynDNS else my account will be dropped
'BAAWWWWWW, my free service should be perfect in everyway in perpetuate.' Sounds like to me if it was important to you you would have been paying a little more attention to it in the first place. I bet you also think you should be able to use any web site for free without ads, and should be able to download free movies and TV and music. It's normal to drop inactive accounts, with a free service 90% users sign up, use it for 3 months then never touch it again. Don't be so entitled.
Re:DynDNS honours their own one time donatations (Score:5, Insightful)
Those who have lifetime service on DynDNS will not lose it. We take providing that service very seriously, since some of our biggest fans are our longtime customers.
Chris Gonyea
DynDNS Support
Re:blah @ DynDNS (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As a current free DynDNS user... (Score:4, Insightful)
EveryDNS has left the building... (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you tried to contact EveryDNS lately? No one is there.
Well, I donated to EveryDNS at year-end, but my account wasn't updated to "donator" status. Repeated attempts to contact them over the last 3 weeks have gone completely unanswered.
The conclusion? DynDNS bought EveryDNS, sent everybody home, and we're just a server failure away from having to scramble to find another DNS. Maybe some of us will sign up for DynDNS's paid service? Wouldn't that be nice for the new owners...
Well, that matters little (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't know anything about EveryDNS (had never heard of it before) and have no idea about their employees. However, many one-person "organizations" (whether a company, a small department of such, admin of a website...) refer to themselves as "we". If you say "I think something", you give the impression of one person who can well be wrong, an asshole, etc... Calling yourself "I" in any announcement that some people won't like is just asking for trouble. At the very least you might get the reputation of an asshole.
However, plural or at least third person... You are taking the responsibility off your shoulders. Not "I, John Smith, have decided to block you from facebook". People will just think "John, you are an asshole. Stop that." but if you say "The IT department has..." you are taking the responsibility off your back. It is the faceless organization now that has come up with the policy. In addition, it's all-knowing organization with all the expertise, etc...
Amazingly, this works very well. I've worked a lot of times in jobs with a lot of customer interaction and this is pretty much mandatory there if you don't want to get flamed constantly.
Re:Easy answer (Score:1, Insightful)
"Overly Expensive"? $30 a year for a service that I've never seen go down and provides 5+ dns servers in various different countries so its always available is pretty cheap if you ask me.
I can't even find a comparable DNS solution - all the hosting providers i've seen give you two DNS servers, both in a single datacenter, so when their links go down - so does your site.
DynDNS has the DNS servers dotted all over the globe so even if an entire country goes offline your DNS will still be up.