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

https://watilo.com/my-domain-registrar-dnsimple-tried-to-5x-the-cost-of-my-reseller-plan

by corywatilo • 2 years ago

86 35 2 years ago

tomschwiha• 2 years ago

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

0x073• 2 years ago

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)

jabiko2• 2 years ago

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.

ganoushoreilly• 2 years ago

Why did the change need to happen if this is a plausible outcome? Why add the risk to an existing customer that by all metrics is already loyal? Wouldn't an email with a % price increase and explanation been more acceptable? Why the drastic change in price?

It's someone trying to squeeze more revenues quickly and by doing so, damaging their brand / reputation.

jabiko2• 2 years ago

I'm not trying to defend DNSimple and their decision to not keep the legacy plan around for existing customers. Sure, that's a hostile move that seems the be designed to squeeze more revenue from their existing customer base. I'm just wondering why the author didn't at least try to explore that avenue.

hiatus• 2 years ago

It seems like more work to write a rant and post it to hackernews than to just take a quick phone call.

corywatilo2• 2 years ago

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

johnklos• 2 years ago

If someone says your prices will go up by a factor of five, there's very little if no chance you'll negotiate to anywhere close to the current price.

Also, when someone is barely satisfied with the current offerings, something like this would be the impetus needed to do something new.

velcrovan2• 2 years ago

I've been with DNSimple for years (personal and business accounts) and am watching closely to see whether I need to think about moving off in the next year or so. I've also started to feel like something is off … price hikes with no added benefits have me wondering if it would really be so bad to manage DNS for ≈ 30 domains at Hover or something.

badlibrarian• 2 years ago

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.

sebastian_z• 2 years ago

Porkbun [1] is also good (I have no affiliation with them; just a happy customer).

[1] https://porkbun.com/.

LtdJorge• 2 years ago

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, without using their registrar, just in case there is a problem or misunderstanding with a site, I still have the authority over DNS in a different provider and can switch quickly.

layer8• 2 years ago

Cloudflare is already too powerful. Using their domain registration only plays into solidifying their market domination.

selectnull• 2 years ago

Oh man... this is not the first time they're doing it. I've been their user and they have deprecated the plan I've signed up for. After a call with the CEO, we have come to an agreement of a custom plan that allowed my to keep one of the features I really needed (vanity name servers) at the time. That was in 2015. In 2017 I had another call with them at after that I decided to move away.

I was a happy customer for years, but felt they were not good on past promises about the pricing. Moved to GCP and slashed my monthly bill to a 1/5 of what I was paying to DNSimple. Still with GCP today (for DNS).

physhster2• 2 years ago

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.

devinparadise• 2 years ago

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 Heroku, since they do not give you IP addresses for your servers - you have to use CNAME or ALIAS records.

physhster2• 2 years ago

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

tobinfekkes• 2 years ago

Hey Cory, small world! Nice to see this pop up on HN! We've never talked, but we're related :)

Glad to have a family-member in this crazy tech world. Rising costs, worsening products, sorry to hear of your predicament.

justplay• 2 years ago

been there left the boat.

superq• 2 years ago

EasyDNS might be a few cents more (literally) than the alternatives, but they're a smallish company and have never pulled this nonsense. (Also their customer support assist in preventing domain hijacks and recovering, which is pretty important if your domain is valuable.)

Porkbun is pretty good, too, but their margin is smaller and domain protection is less of a thing for them.

Google and Cloudflare are very cheap (because it's hard to make money on a dollar profit margin per year) but they're very big companies, so customer service is not quite the same as at a small company.

rendaw• 2 years ago

I tried Porkbun after suggestions here. The symbols in my password caused a 403 error. Porkbun is terrible (although I'm not sure if there's a better other option).

Cloudflare also isn't a general purpose registrar - they won't let you point to external nameservers which makes migration bad.

EasyDNS doesn't support U2F.

Google... the usual risk of getting banned for some youtube upload and losing all your domains.

I switched to DNSimple after several Gandi fiascos. I'm not a reseller, and the fast that they charge a fee made me hope they wouldn't try to skim in other places, but I'd be happy to know of a registrar that checks all the boxes (box 1: u2f, box 2: no glaring technical issues).

mekoka• 2 years ago

Also their customer support assist in preventing domain hijacks and recovering, which is pretty important if your domain is valuable.

I might be missing something here, but why do you feel that this particular service is worth highlighting? Genuinely asking because maybe there's something I'm not aware of. I was under the impression that most popular registrars have procedures in place to prevent this kind of things. To transfer a domain, I usually have to unlock it and/or provide some kind of transfer activation code, I get an email, then there's some transfer waiting period.

How do people get their domains stolen these days that would make EasyDNS's customer support particularly stellar in that regard?

settsu• 2 years ago

Some "unit elasticity" going on maybe?

Seems a little odd to be surprised when a business that (by the author's own admission in this case) seems to have an established history of customer hostile actions.

sgammon• 2 years ago

Was not aware this still existed in 2024

bww• 2 years ago

I recently transferred all my domains and cancelled a DNSimple account I’ve had for more than a decade for similar reasons.

A couple years ago they migrated me to a more expensive plan with no notice, I had to catch the price difference on an invoice. I wasn’t happy but it’s a lot of work to transfer domains.

Recently I discovered they introduced a plan that fit my usage and cost 50% less, but (would you believe it) they didn’t bother quietly migrating me to that plan…

These guys can’t be trusted.

rootsudo• 2 years ago

Interesting. I know to become a registrar it is something like 70k. Didn’t think that providing an api to register a domain would be a serviceable business.

Now it does.

aeden2• 2 years ago

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 zone and then for the DNS queries.

The price changes around domain registrations have not been coming from us, rather registry operators have been raising many of their wholesale prices repeatedly in recent years. The operator for .COM even showed up in the news recently when Senator Warren called for an investigation into Versign for the price changes around that TLD. We’ve either kept domain prices stable for as long as we could, or even reduced them, as long as we were able to retain some small margin.

The price changes around operational DNS stems from the rising prices of infrastructure as well as changes by our vendors for various services related to DNS operations. Last year we overhauled our pricing to try to remain competitive in the DNS operational space by reducing minimum requirements (you can register domains with us and use another DNS provider which is something you could not do with our previous pricing model) and by aligning to actual costs (we were not charging for queries for a long time, but we are being charged for queries for things like DDoS defense and edge caching, so we had to update our prices to reflect these changes).

Operating a business means you have to keep at least 3 groups happy: the customers, the team, and the owners. Many times I have to make a decision that will make someone unhappy, and it sucks, but I do it to ensure we can continue operating and keep providing service to those that see value in what we offer. This is one of those cases. From the operational DNS perspective, our Basic Reseller plan has been operating at a loss for the last few years, so it had to ultimately go.

To Cory and any other customer who feels we did not communicate well on the changes: I’m sorry. I assure you we have tried over and over through emails and one-on-one conversations to explain why these changes were necessary. I, and the entire DNSimple team, have always been very open with any customer that is frustrated with changes we’ve made, and we will continue to do so. If you ever want to talk to me about DNSimple, my inbox is always open.

paulddraper• 2 years ago

rising prices of infrastructure

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

aeden2• 2 years ago

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).

spl757• 2 years ago

[flagged]

EagleStance• 2 years ago

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.

corywatilo2• 2 years ago

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.

netsharc• 2 years ago

My 2024 pet peeve is people exposing their illiteracy to me by using "nx" (n = a number) as a verb...

"to 2x" = "to double"

"to 5x" = "to quintuple".

Just noticed his blog's tagline... I think terrible grammar is poor UX too. =]

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

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