GoDaddy's New "Selective DNS Blackouts" Policy

http://rscott.org/dns/GoDaddy_Selective_DNS_Blackouts.htm

by rednaught • 15 years ago

249 85 15 years ago

rscott.org

And a response from GoDaddy:

http://rscott.org/dns/GoDaddy_Selective_DNS_Blackouts_Update.htm

rednaught3• 15 years ago

And Godaddy's response:

http://rscott.org/dns/GoDaddy_Selective_DNS_Blackouts_Update...

dredmorbius• 15 years ago

That just doesn't make sense.

Whether it's R. Scott Perry or GoDaddy's PR flack who're confusing DNS with WHOIS data, I'm not sure.

I've encountered throttle limits on WHOIS queries from numerous registrars, going back years. In the normal course of events, it's not necessary to query WHOIS a whole lot, but some legitimate uses (spam and other forms of abuse fighting, for example) are ... expediated somewhat by access to, say, contact information for a given network.

Some years ago I investigated caching whois clients and found jwhois to be reasonably good (it presumes information about whois servers which isn't always accurate) and both greatly speeds up response times and reduces repeat requests for a given entity.

politician2• 15 years ago

tldr: The new owners of GoDaddy have decided to block DNS traffic rather then invest in their infrastructure to handle the additional load. See also: bridges, roads, wireless carriers.

rkalla• 15 years ago

tldr addendum: because they want to push back some of the 99% of registered sites that use the free DNS service yet drive huge amounts of traffic and want them to upgrade to DNS Premium support.

speleding• 15 years ago

"GoDaddy have decided to block DNS traffic rather then invest in their infrastructure to handle the additional load"

The article doesn't say that at all, it specifically mentions that this is not the reason for the block. Did you read it before commenting?

politician2• 15 years ago

Yeah, I did, but I accidentally included information from the "GoDaddy response" linked by rednaught. If you didn't read the 2nd link, then I understand how it sounds wrong. In retrospect, I should have replied to rednaught's post.

kennywinker• 15 years ago

Can someone explain the implications of this a little clearer? It sounds bad, but I don't understand why.

lisper• 15 years ago

If you use GoDaddy your sites may not work because GoDaddy is too cheap to provision enough servers to handle the load. So don't use GoDaddy.

pplante• 15 years ago

Lets not over-sensationalize this, buy domains from GoDaddy, just skip the other services. Their domains and SSL certs are still some of the cheapest.

rednaught3• 15 years ago

A further note: Also if you use an external monitoring service(e.g. Pingdom, Wormly, Exactstate) that performs DNS traversals for each check instead of relying on a recursive server, this likely explains any increase in false alarms.

barumrho• 15 years ago

If you are using their DNS service.

veyron• 15 years ago

Is there a market nowadays for a new low-cost registrar / hosting provider?

dangrossman2• 15 years ago

There's always a market for lower cost, but you're not going to beat the prices of the highest volume registrar in the world.

EwanToo• 15 years ago

For registrars, the margins are basically non-existant, low cost + high volume is where they're all already at.

For .com domains, Verisign charge all registrars $7.34 per registration (going up to $7.85 in January 2012), so when you consider GoDaddy charge $11.99 (less with various offers), it's not a big margin business.

imrehg• 15 years ago

I'm still confused why would anyone want to by their domain name from GoDaddy, after all this press they get. It looks like a horrible company in general (not just this story) and everyone giving them money just helps them suck more. If I could see they are improving, then a current suckiness can be forgiven, but when actually getting worse?

lazyjeff• 15 years ago

It shouldn't be confusing. It's the price.

Domains are a commodity, and $7.69 for a domain (after applying one of the widely-available coupons) is the lowest price in the industry. If someone registers many domains, this adds up quickly.

buff-a• 15 years ago

Netsol, register, etc all charge $6.99 if you ask.

terrapinbear• 15 years ago

networksolutions has sales occasionally. I just registered a domain name for two years for $13.00.

blakeperdue• 15 years ago

I think it's more name recognition. Nearly all of my freelance clients who bought their own domain name for a new venture used Godaddy. Why? Because it's the only domain registrar they've ever heard of.

They don't know about Godaddy's bad press or it's upselling techniques. They just know they saw a superbowl ad saying "need a domain name? use godaddy"

karlzt• 15 years ago

this is the cheapest I know of: http://www.namecheap.com/

orenmazor• 15 years ago

because if you google "godaddy promo", you're likely to buy the .com/.net/.in/.whatever for $1-5 at any given time.

libraryatnight3• 15 years ago

I've used GoDaddy for registrations for years, never a problem. My DNS is managed elsewhere, but for registrations I haven't had an issue with GoDaddy ever.

amirrustam• 15 years ago

What do you guys use instead of GoDaddy? Just interested to see what others prefer out there. I was gonna do a domain transfer to GoDaddy, but after reading this I won't be considering them.

noinput• 15 years ago

use them to hold your registration, then set your DNS up with cloudflare.com

masonhensley• 15 years ago

That's what we've been doing.

Yesh2• 15 years ago

Could you explain (how to) a bit more on this?

vectorpush• 15 years ago

I've used 1and1.com for years and they are almost always cheaper than godaddy.

mtogo2• 15 years ago

Watch out: 1and1 might not be quite as bad as godaddy in some of their policies, but they are very close. Avoid if at all possible.

penblue• 15 years ago

Namecheap. Their own coupon site is at http://www.namecheapcoupons.com/

sasha-dv• 15 years ago

I've been using namecheap for years. Never had any problems with them. They are reasonably priced and fast to respond. The only thing I don't like is their slightly confusing interface. Hiring an UX engineer and giving him free reign wouldn't hurt them :)

statenjason• 15 years ago

I transferred from GoDaddy to name.com about a year ago by recommendation of a friend. It's nice to not be bombarded with GD babes and just enter my account to do what I need to do.

jamesbritt• 15 years ago

I use godaddy to just do what I want, and really like the ui. Maybe I just know where to click but I'm not bombarded by anything.

Yesh2• 15 years ago

I agree with this. And sorry for the rant.

I keep getting emails about expiring domains and auto-renewals. I maintain a separate spread-sheet to keep track of these.

For some reason it not only annoys me but it always make my blood pressure shoot up. To turn these alerts off you have to disable auto-renew for the domain. This check box is not easy to find. They hide the auto-renew check box column very cleverly.

Now I get emails about expiring other services... I still haven't figured how to turn these off.

jsnell• 15 years ago

I wish I hadn't switched to name.com. If you use their DNS servers they automatically add a wildcard record pointing to a parking page. There is no way of turning that off besides defining your own bogus wildcard record.

soult2• 15 years ago

There are multiple threads on HN already answering your question, you can find them via the search function. (This comment is not meant to cry "double post", just as a pointer for your to look for more information on GoDaddy alternatives).

fractalcat• 15 years ago

I use dnsimple (http://dnsimple.com). It's not one of the cheaper ones (US$3/month for DNS hosting up to ten domains, US$14/registration), but it has a nice UI, JSON REST API and support that doesn't suck.

abraham• 15 years ago

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

Pay for what you use from people with do right by their customers.

dangravell• 15 years ago

Straightforward hosting too. I use them simply for 301'ing requests to my root domain to my dub-dub-dub site, that being hosted on Amazon S3. The pay as you go approach to that makes it very cost effective.

hessenwolf• 15 years ago

Nametoolkit.com, because it's ours.

RexRollman• 15 years ago

I've been using Gandi for years now and I really like them. But since I've never never had a problem, I really can't comment on their customer service.

elliottcarlson• 15 years ago

I second Gandi - I transferred to them from Dotster for many reasons and the service is excellent - not to mention the free SSL certificates with your domain purchase, which has come in handy a few times.

sschueller• 15 years ago

enom.com

Karunamon• 15 years ago

Not just no, HELL no. Enom is almost worse than godaddy in some ways, especially when it comes to transfers. They will hold you down for the maximum amount of time they can before actually processing a transfer. I've had to deal with their support more than once because of a XFR being stuck in their process somewhere.

They're also a huge reseller. I'd rather deal with a tier 1 provider instead of one 2 or 3 links down the chain.

drzaiusapelord2• 15 years ago

namecheap.com. Clean interface compared to to godaddy's horrible nightmare of upsell ads and 1990s level UI/UX.

davidu• 15 years ago

lots of words, not a lot of evidence.

I know quite a few ops and abuse folks at godaddy who have root or enable, but this doesn't seem substantiated enough for me to even waste their time with.

The title is linkbait. There is no such official policy that we know of or that this bloggers knows of. This person is making a supposition, at best.

rednaught3• 15 years ago

I added a link in another comment to the response he received from Godaddy. Sorry it has fallen through the depths here.

ghshephard2• 15 years ago

No major DNS provider would engage in a "Selective DNS Blackout" because of resource constraints - DNS is one of those protocols that is both embarrassingly parallel, as well as super efficient to serve. It's not unreasonable to see a well tuned, inexpensive (< $5K) DNS server provide on the order of 100,000 responses/second. And if you want to serve a million responses/second - just scale horizontally and add the resolvers to your VIP pool on your load balancer.

This article doesn't pass the common sense test. Not to say that GoDaddy isn't engaging in this selective DNS blackout policy, just that it's not because of a underinvestment in their infrastructure.

bartwe• 15 years ago

Maybe the article has been changed but it indeed says that it most likely not about cost but about pushing a 'premium' dns service.

ghshephard2• 15 years ago

That makes a lot more sense. It would be a lot better if the DNS provider said something like, "First million DNS entries served is free, after that, we charge you $0.50/million queries" (Amazon pricing for DNS)

Then, you respond to every request as fast as you can. (Note, this also provides an incentive to the customer to jack up the TTL on the resource records, so 99.99% of the requests are handled at the caching servers instead of GoDaddy)

bwblabs• 15 years ago

Some proof would be nice here. I almost thought having some proof after using Watchmouse DNS Analysis on a Godaddy DNS hosted domain: http://www.watchmouse.com/en/dnstool.php?varghost=cheapdomai... , and hit some 'No response' from multiple locations. But some Watchmouse test locations always reply with 'No response' (Amsterdam3-Netherlands; Belgrade-Serbia; Budapest-Hungary; Frankfurt-Germany; Lille-France; Madrid-Spain; Novosibirsk-Russia; San Francisco-U.S.A.; Sofia-Bulgaria).

Any other good DNS tool that queries from multiple GEO locations?

drzaiusapelord2• 15 years ago

The company that uses bikini-clad women gyrating on the screen as advertising may not be very professional with their IT infrastructure? Who knew!

Seriously, time to migrate to namecheap.com or other. Its sad this kind of advertising even works.

freddealmeida• 15 years ago

I moved away from GoDaddy years ago. They have proven themselves to be irrationally self-interested. This is just one more reason no one should use them. While the domain cost is low, ancillary costs are high: not to mention moral cost for using a company that kills Elephants for sport.

sp332• 15 years ago

The elephant was attacking a town, right? It was going to be killed in defense anyway. The town managed to sell "kill rights" to a rich idiot, good for them.

beedogs• 15 years ago

Just another reason I don't do business with GoDaddy. And neither should you.

soult2• 15 years ago

By the way, the domain rscott.org is registered with GoDaddy.

georgieporgie• 15 years ago

I tallied up all the votes in a HN thread about registrars and settled on NearlyFreeSpeech.net. Their payment system is weird (you fund your pool of money from which charges are deducted), but otherwise it was quick, painless, and not full of creepy, sexualized imagery and cheesy, repetitive upselling techniques.

GoDaddy is a bit cheaper if you spend the time to scrounge up coupon codes, but wow, NearlyFreeSpeech was the first time my domain registrar's website didn't give me a headache.

idlewords• 15 years ago

Usually that kind of payment system is there to avoid having to pay significant per-transaction fees, which are especially onerous for low-priced stuff.

guelo• 15 years ago

It's a shame, HN used to function as a super high quality recommendation resource for startup services like this. Now after they removed comment scores not so much, or at least not as easily.

seabee• 15 years ago

NFS was a GoDaddy reseller, last time I checked.

josephb• 15 years ago

According to the NFS FAQ they use Public Domain Registry.

http://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/section/domainregistration/a...

mst• 15 years ago

I once ended up in a ... discusssion ... with the owner of nfs.net about deployment of certain open source projects I'm involved with. It didn't end well, due to a couple of early misunderstandings that we failed to resolve before the conversation went of the rails.

As such, I don't think I'd ever want to be a customer of theirs.

However, I -do- believe that their service is competently delivered and extremely cost effective; every other user I've ever spoken to has been entirely happy, so I've put my own experience down to a combination of personality conflict and bad luck, and am happy to say their service is likely one very much worth considering if you fall into any of the markets they target.

ez774• 15 years ago

I like how he uses mostly POSH [1] for his markup. Too bad he must appeal to something like the H4 element in order to include the author's name and the publication date.

It is difficult to understand that an academic such as Berners-Lee came up with prominently article-oriented HTML and did not include an AUTHOR tag or DATE tag.

[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/posh

ars3• 15 years ago

Um, what does this have to do with the article?

ez774• 15 years ago

It is a technical point, in a technical forum. It is fairly common for HNers to comment, say, on the CSS technology used in an article about the US deficit, and they are generally not downvoted or scolded. Similarly, my comment is that the author essentially appeals to no CSS at all.

dotBen• 15 years ago

Domain registration != DNS hosting

I continue to be amazed at how many startups (and other companies, high profile individuals, etc) rely on GoDaddy for their DNS rather than having a properly managed DNS hosting as part of their web-hosting solution.

DNS tacked on to domain registration is a throwaway after thought - certainly for GoDaddy, regardless of whether this 'blackout' is true or not.

RyanKearney• 15 years ago

People honestly use GoDaddy for anything other than domain names? NEVER use the same company to host your DNS as you registered your domain with. At that point you're pretty much putting all your eggs in one basket.

johngalt• 15 years ago

You don't buy DNS service from Godaddy, you buy registration. The DNS service is a courtesy.

For all this article states here's much more likely what's happening:

1. People are using the "free DNS service" for high traffic sites rather than rolling their own or buying a paid DNS service. Then setting their TTLs to 1 hour to make changes easier.

2. Godaddy is paying real $$ to host DNS for all those domains and in some cases could be revenue negative on a domain because of it. Regardless of how cheap you think DNS hosting is, Godaddy makes $3-4/year or less on a domain registration.

3. Godaddy is responding by throttling sources of extreme (possibly automated) DNS query traffic.

The author is someone going to the cheapest registrar and complaining that the complimentary serivces have limits. Once those limits are found he is trying to paint a "cheap/greedy corporation" picture. If the author is looking to write about underinvestment in infrastructure, he should consider an autobiography.

jonursenbach• 15 years ago

Since when is GoDaddy a monopoly?

libraryatnight3• 15 years ago

Yea, it seems like a trend these days that if someone controls a majority market share people on the internet start screaming "monopoly!"

Go Daddy has lots of competition, they're just outselling all of them.

GoDaddy's New "Selective DNS Blackouts" Policy

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