Ten Years of easyDNS

We bought some banner ads on a relatively obscure website called "slashdot.org", it yielded zero sales initially (but hey, we weren't exactly tracking conversions, but the cash register simply didn't ring). There were no such things as google alerts or technorati so we had to rely on friends forwarding us mentions of easydns or go looking ourselves to see what the reactions were.

The initial feedback was bad. "Looks good, but these guys are idiots if they think they can charge for DNS" was the sentiment. In those days, Network Solutions had the monopoly on domain registration for .com/.net/.org so when people decided to register a domain through us, they'd pay us for the DNS and email forwarding service, and then get another invoice from Network Solutions for the actual domain registration. Network Solutions didn't pay us a commission for our customer domains that we registered through them, in fact they used to give us a hard time and threaten that they would stop accepting registrations from us. (Ah, those heady days of monopoly power. They must miss them terribly).

We had another business in those days, we were among the first wave of companies designing websites with "dynamically generated" content. "Data Driven Websites" I used to call it. PHP front end with a mysql backend run by an apache webserver on a linux box, your standard LAMP stack. And every time we got a new client on board we usually had to move their website to our servers since most web hosts didn't support the LAMP model yet. We almost always ran into the same set of problems:

• The person who initially regged the domain was nowhere to be found and he was the admin and tech contact on the domain
  
• The ISP or the web host had registered the domain in their own name and didn't want to let it transfer away
  

This happened so often to our clients that an idea I had had a few years earlier, when I was a sysadmin at an ISP called inforamp.net, kept coming back to nag at me. In those days I was responsible for registering new domains for web hosting customers, making DNS changes to their zonefiles whenever they needed it, and maintaining their database of email forwarding aliases they wanted setup for their domain. All of which was done manually, by me, after email exchanges or telephone conversations with the customers.

"Somebody should just build an interface to automate all of this and push it right back into customer's web browser"

Was a constant thought for me. But at the time I never considered myself to be anybody, let alone that "somebody". So a couple years later when our own clients kept hitting those same roadblocks that idea came back with a vengence and we decided to do it. It took us a couple years to code it in our spare time, but it was ready in 1998.

Needless to say, we've come a long way since then. The entire domain registration and DNS hosting industry has.

easyDNS has over the years gotten to this point:

• 14 fulltime employees, many of which have been here over 5 years
  
• those employees have 7 children, with one on the way
  
• roughly 100,000 domains under management
  
• 40,000 active members in over 100 countries worldwide
  
• nearly 20 nameservers deployed in 2 anycast strands & 3 clusters in the US, Canada, London UK, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Hong Kong with more on the way
  
• we answer about a quarter billion DNS queries per day
  

Since we're taking stock we probably should allow that it hasn't by any stretch been an "easy" road:

• Two complete DNS failures resulting from DDOS attacks: April 14, 2003 and Sept 14, 2005, each lasting a little over an hour.
  
• One part-time employee and friend died of cancer
  
• Two of the three founding partners left to pursue other career choices
  

All told, there has never been a dull moment in the last 10 years of easyDNS and I still maintain that this company is the single, most exciting thing I've ever done in my life (and I used to be in a heavy metal band that blew up a piano for an album cover photo)

What will the next 10 years bring for easyDNS?

We've always been "weirdos" in the conventional sense because we have no "exit strategy". There's never been an end-goal we relentlessly drive toward like a high-flying IPO and we run screaming whenever we get offers to entertain mergers, rollups or other half-baked ideas that usually flame-out. So the world is stuck with us, probably for another decade at least.

What our members can anticipate in the near future will serve our members well:

New Member Interface

We've been working on a ground up rewrite of the user interface and it's finally ready. We're now testing it and we will begin to invite early adopters to move over by end of summer, early fall. The new interface solves many of the old headaches, allows batch updates, supports IPv6, geo-targetting, production failover DNS and monitoring (not beta, like it is now) and many more enhancements we'd like to hold off on announcing until they're able to be accessed by our members.

Email and Hosting

From the beginning we have remained "hosting agnostic" with regard to email and web hosting. It was a deliberate strategy at the time which we have, I think, outgrown. Over the years we have become what I call "accidental experts" in forwarding large volumes of email and we learned so much about email performance, we've actually gone and built an email infrastructure that works quite well. I've been using it for nearly a year and we're getting ready to roll it out.

Web hosting is another story. About a year ago again, we began an internal process to change the way we do things. We purchased a Network Appliance with redundant heads and began virtualizing all our infrastructure using Xen and VPS technology. So instead of having a bunch of "servers" that comprise our mail forwarding pool, or our web forwarder, we know have VPS images for different roles. If mail forwarding is experiencing abnormal load, we simply "spin up" some additional mail forwarder instances until things calm down and then we wind them down. It turns out we've gotten pretty good at this too, so lookout for a VPS hosting service sometime in the fall.

Why are we entering these fields? To make a long story short, our customers have been asking for this for nearly 10 years. People who like doing business with us would like to consolidate their other IT functions with us and it's time we let them do it. We are not going out to become the next big web hosting provider or email vendor. We're just giving those members who want this option, that ability.

That said, it is a change for us, but you can count on us to approach these services with the same attention to customer service that we have been providing in the DNS business for the past 10 years.

Double secret nifty killer apps

Yes, we have a few of those "in-the-can" so to speak. Once the new platform rolls out, you can bank on us returning to our rightful place as the pace-setting DNS company. I know full well we haven't been setting that pace for a few years and there's no need to bore anybody with the details why. Suffice it to say, our second decade is where we make our big move (how many internet companies can say that?)