easyDNS Blog - News

Verisign raises fees on .COM and .NET, easyDNS...doesn't

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:11:41 -0400

Last week Verisign notified ICANN and all registrars that come October 15 they will raise the wholesale registry cost on .COM domains 7% and on .NET 10%.

We won't go off on too much of a rant about the sweetheart deal Verisign got themselves in this registry contact. Had the process been opened up to competitive bidding we would be seeing the wholesale cost going down not up. I know at least one registry operator who would have gone in at about a third of Verisign's price.

Anyway, such is the registrar business, you exist at the whims of a registry monopoly (which is one reason we're a lot more focused on the DNS hosting side of the equation)

Having said all that, we will be eating the difference and there will be no price increase in response to this.

That which does not kill us...

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 13:52:39 -0400

People have been wondering about "all those DDOS attacks" we have been hit with and more importantly, what we were going to do about it.

We haven't been idle over the past weeks although we have been quiet. One of my least favorite things is talking about security out loud, because I think making a statement such as "Hey everybody, we just upgraded our firewalls" invites attack from the script kiddies. But in light of the recent spate of attacks and that there were so many of them over a sustained period of weeks; we not only had to do something, we also have a responsibility to say something for the benefit of our members.

We've upgraded the main pipe into our core facilities at Q9, and without giving out blueprints suffice it to say our bandwidth capacity has increased by a factor of 10. We've also replaced the firewalls with brand new firewall/attack mitigation appliances which can also handle more than 10 times the packets as the old ones.

On another front, and perhaps more significant: we've replaced and redeployed all of the remote nameservers. Where before they were simply lease units supplied by their respective data centers, we bought new, more powerful servers and shipped them to Prolexic.com data centers. Prolexic has a solution called "Clean Pipe" and their core value proposition is: DOS attack mitigation. They didn't exist in 2003 when the first "big one" hit but they do now and some of our members as well as the RCMP's Integrated Technological Crime Unit recommended them highly.

One of the reasons we haven't spoken in detail to this was that given the frequency of attacks over september, we thought we would wait for another one to see how the new systems hold up.

Aside from an attack on remote3 after it had been moved to Prolexic, there hasn't been another incident (yet), but we are happy to report that the attack on remote3 was handled by the Prolexic systems as advertised. The new remote3 was not affected by DOS, and it was of greater intensity than previous ones which had already knocked out the old remotes.

At this point I would go out on a limb to say that in a bad scenario where we may lose the web interface for a brief time under a very intense DOS, we will NOT lose DNS functionality again.

Thanks to all our members, you've shown great understanding, patience and loyalty through this intense (and horribly timed) period.

This is Day 0

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 22:01:59 -0400

Well not quite. As mentioned in the recent email to active members, this morning I purchased the other co-founder's shares in easyDNS. As we sat around the boardroom table it was noted that the transaction takes place nearly 7 years to the day from when we formally incorporated easyDNS back in 1998.

In internet years that's not bad. Especially considering the three of us started the company with zero funding. We somehow stumbled through the dotcom boom without becoming billionaires and survived the ensuing shakeout without going bankrupt. Between those two extremes we did something to be proud of: we created a viable business out of nothing.

I'll leave the other co-founder's names out of this post to respect their privacy. Suffice it to say one left last summer in order to spend more time with his young family and the other left earlier this year to literally "follow-that-dream". To be able to do these things is why we become entrepreneurs. I know they will both excel in their chosen endeavors and I hope you all join me in wishing them well.

As for me, I am also "living the dream" because my dream is this company. Always has been. easyDNS is the most exciting and rewarding thing I've ever done. I live and breathe this company and I'm grateful for the opportunity to take it to the next level.

Our membership has never failed to fascinate me over the years. As I comb through system logs or peruse the database I often stumble across domains and think "Oh my! Those guys are our customers? That's so cool." Just as often I'll see a domain name I've never heard of, decide to check it out and stumble into a whole new world.

I'll never be bored as long as I'm in this company and I look forward to serving our members with new and improved services and resources over the coming days and years.