We apologise for the inconvenience, but this is necessary to allow us to further enhance the easyMail service, and to also provide some highly requested features.

Thank you for your continued use of easyDNS!

[ Update - 2013-05-20 @ 4:03am EST] The planned maintenance to the easyMail service tonight has been completed, yet customers may have trouble connecting via IMAP and IMAP-SSL. We will be increasing our IMAP resources ASAP, and apologise for the inconvenience.

The post [ONGOING] Maintenance – easyMail – Sunday, May 19, 2013 appeared first on blog.easydns.org.

We will be performing some upgrades to our host monitoring and failover system on Saturday, May 18 at 9:00 PM EDT. During this time host checks will be disabled. The maintenance window is expected to last 3 hours, but we will bring the service back online earlier if maintenance is completed sooner than expected.

Thank you for your patience, and we apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.

The post [COMPLETED] MAINTENANCE WINDOW: Host monitoring/failover Saturday, May 18 2013 9:00 PM EDT appeared first on blog.easydns.org.

It was nearly a year ago when Victor Granic asked to pick my brain around “how to build an awesome company” (Thanks Victor, that’s quite a compliment). He was building a startup that was doing a lot of WordPress development. Similar to the precursor company from which easyDNS came out of, they found themselves hosting their customers internally because it was (and still is, until now) difficult to find places that do managed WordPress hosting properly. (It’s not as simple as throwing the latest WordPress tar ball into a cpanel server somewhere. Anybody who’s ever had to run and maintain a production level WordPress installation probably already knows this.)

After we talked about the culture of a company, where it comes from and how to sustain a healthy one over the years, we had an idea: Why don’t our respective companies collaborate on a managed WordPress offering? Victor and his team would continue to build the guts of the hosting platform while we would be the DNS and failover layer and then support it. Thus, easyPress was born.

What makes easyPress unique, even from other managed WordPress hosting offerings out there, is the integration with the DNS and domain name aspects provided by easyDNS. While it’s not mandatory to run your easyPress websites using easyDNS, you may was well because every easyPress installation bundles with our DNS Pro level service (that means 19 name servers worldwide across 3 any cast clouds plus failover DNS and even includes the domain name fees).

easyPress is deployed via 3 disparate data centres, and a warm spare copy of every installed website is kept in all three DC’s. We turn up failover DNS on your website as soon as it’s provisioned. If something happens to your website within the main DC, we flip you over to one of the spares.

If you’re serious about WordPress then you should have a look. If we can convince renowned futurist (himself a WordPress whiz) Jim Carroll that easyPress could outperform a seriously tricked up setup on a dedicated VPS, you probably want to find out for yourself.

Other early adopters include Waterloo area tech hub Communitech (who got Ycombinator-ed early in the deployment without so much as a hiccup) and here at easyDNS we are in the process of migrating our entire front end website into WordPress and hosting it on easyPress, so we are clearly drinking our own kool-aid.

In fact we moved this blog onto it last week.

The Cacti graph to the left depicts the performance of it before and after the migration to easyPress. That spike in the middle was the actual cutover when we were futzing with the redirects to finally roll off of that blog2.easydns.org back onto our blog.easydns.org hostname (long story, but it involved one of our posts that "went viral" slamming our WordPress blog into oblivion!).

easyPress does for WordPress what we do for your DNS requirements: all the considerations you have around upgrades, maintenance, backup and restore, security, monitoring and disaster recovery can be offloaded. We got this. That way you can get on with putting the “content” part into what is now the most widely used content manager on the web.

Check out easyPress.ca here.

The post Announcing easyPress, managed WordPress hosting – high performance wp with built-in disaster recovery appeared first on blog.easydns.org.

Recently launched "domainPlus" package perfect for non mission-critical domains.

You asked for it, we listened.

The number of requests we've gotten from you, our members, who love our services and clueful support reps yet have trouble justifying the cost for their less critical domains was overwhelming.

We listened and earlier this year, created our domainPlus service to further increase the value you get while keeping your costs down.

For $15/year, you get:

• domain registry fees (renewals, registrations, transfers)
• DNS hosting on 3 nameservers (East Coast, West Coast and Europe, with Asia on the horizon)
• Email forwarding & URL forwarding
• Same clueful support 7 days/ week

Here's a full comparison chart of the differences between service levels:

You can switch your domains to domainPlus at any time by logging in to manage your domains, then under the Domain Settings tab go to Service Management -> and then Downgrade.

Or, after you've logged in and selected the domain, you want to switch to domainPlus here.

After downgrading, please take 30 seconds to answer a few questions about your reasons so we can tailor our services to your needs.

If you want to bulk switch a number of domains, you can also use the EASY-DOES.IT valet service and have us do it for you.

One last thing to mention is, we took the liberty of auto-downgrading all domain registry accounts during the move so they receive all the added benefits of domainPlus.

Fine print: domainPlus service is available only for domains where easyDNS is the registrar. If we are your registrar for a country-code domain (ccTLD) that does not have a domainPlus option, contact support to get it created.

Thank you for choosing easyDNS, many of you have been with us for going onto a decade (or more!) and we'd like to provide you the best value for a few more decades!

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please contact us to get them answered and resolved.

Sincerely,

- mark

PS: Please note: the system has been automatically converting "registration only" and "external nameserver" domains to domainPlus since it is cheaper and adds more functionality – I apologize if we missed one of yours, feel free to use the downgrade link or contact support.

Mark Jeftovic <markjr@easydns.com>

President & Founder, easyDNS Technologies Inc.
+1-(416)-535-8672 ext 225

The post Save money on your easyDNS services appeared first on blog.easydns.org.

What lawmakers fail to understand is that taxation specific to the internet, ostensibly to boost revenues into government coffers, in practice will probably diminish them as US businesses lose competitiveness against foreign companies.

To our American friends, easyDNS is a foreign company, so don't let us stop you.

We are queuing up an email right now to send to all our US customers and once it passes we'll remind everybody that we're not a US firm and thus we will not be collecting said Internet taxes. We're really happy about that, and the bigger the tax, the happier we'll be.

Those who know me may be puzzled by this stance, given that we're traditionally anti-big government,  pro-free market, pro-capitalist whack jobs, but hey, business is business – if a bunch of inept policy makers with no grasp of rudimentary economics want to hamstring my American competition (especially the big ones) and force an artificial price increase on them that I can undercut by doing nothing, then by all means pass that internet tax. My daughter will thank you when she heads off to Julliard in about 10 years – I heard that's expensive.

Politicians may be surprised when they see  that taxation, like censorship, will be treated as "damage" on the internet, and ecommerce will simply "route around it". It's one thing to have Good's and Services taxes (like we do here in Canada and over in Europe), which basically applies to everything, a straight up internet tax will have the distinctive characteristic of singularly harming every affected business within the jurisdiction passing the tax, eroding competitiveness at the national level.

What will probably happen is that affected businesses will have to "eat" the tax and drive their margins down, with all the accompanying side-effects of that – like layoffs, downsizing, outsourcing, offshoring and all that stuff that plays really well with voters.

It's like some weird bizarro world where the more governments try to intervene and "manage" any given economy the worse-off and more unmanageable it gets. Go figure.

The post Go ahead, pass the Internet tax. Your (foreign) competitors thank you in advance. appeared first on blog.easydns.org.

We use our own XCP (XenCloudPlatform) distribution (we call it easyXCP). This allows us to combine the latest stable Xen Hypervisor with custom scripts and makes it much easier to compile a custom ISO install image for all of our servers.

A rebuild of our core infrastructure is currently underway and some awesome hardware updates will be coming soon … so stay tuned for more information.

We just finished a major overhaul at one of our co-locations. The goal for this project was to cleanup the rack, setup iSCSI MPIO for the XCP cluster and use jumbo frames (MTU9000). We also updated every server to the latest easyXCP 1.6. With this new version, we now have cross-pool migrations and VDI migration features. This is a very big deal since we can move running VMs between completely separate XenServers without a need for shared storage and with zero downtime. We used different cable colours to identify the different networks.  We took photos before and after so you can get a real sense of how much things have changed.

Before:

After:

Below are some photos of our development cluster. It's exactly the same, but we are using an Opteron platform and Sun Fire servers.

The post Infrastructure improvements appeared first on blog.easydns.org.

We will be performing maintenance tomorrow evening to upgrade a number of systems. All nameservers will continue to resolve during this period and the web portal will remain available for the duration. However, there may be delays on any updates made to customer zones during this window. There will be a brief outage on our outbound system, as well as for secondary inbound/outbound transfers. Finally, there may also be brief delays on inbound mail but all mail will continue to queue and will be delivered once the maintenance is complete.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your continued patience as we work to improve our services.

The post [COMPLETED] MAINTENANCE WINDOW: Saturday 27 April, 11 PM – 2 AM EDT appeared first on blog.easydns.org.

DNS2 mitigation is active, we are encountering difficulties with DNS1 and DNS3. We are working on the situation and will post updates as they become available.

[ Update - 2013-04-23 @ 4:18pm EST ] We have been working with our upstream providers and mitigation is in place at this time. We shall be keeping this configuration active for the time being and will continue to monitor the situation. Thank you for your patience.

[ Update - 2013-04-24 @ 4:07pm EST ] We are still monitoring the situation. Thank you for your patience and we apologise for the inconvenience.

[ Update - 2013-04-25 @ 12:47pm EST ] The attack has subsided and normal services have resumed. We thank you for your patience and apologise for any inconvenience.

The post [RESOLVED] DDoS in progress appeared first on blog.easydns.org.

We apologise for the inconvenience.

The post [RESOLVED] easyMail SSL access issue appeared first on blog.easydns.org.

Click on the Bitcoin logo, once you remit your payment to the Bitcoin address that will be displayed for your particular invoice

Send the exact amount do not round up or down.

Once we receive 6 confirmations on your payment, your invoice will be provisioned.

Also note that for new domain registrations, transfers and DNS service, when you pay via Bitcoin you should use the following nameservers initially:

btc1.easydns.COM

btc2.easydns.NET

Also note that given the volatility in Bitcoin pricing, if you require a refund it will be in normal human currency, like USD or CAD.

You may also be interested in the Bitcoin discussion thread on easyCafe.

The post We now accept Bitcoin as a payment method. appeared first on blog.easydns.org.