EveryDNS sold to Dyn Inc. | Hacker News Reader

EveryDNS sold to Dyn Inc.

dyn.com

38 pointsjamesbritt20 comments

I've been using EveryDNS for over five years now. Great service. Frankly I'm torn because David deserves lots of credit and to do with the service whatever he wants. I just hope this isn't a quick buy and turn for DynDns.

They are obviously a for-profit company, did an ROI calculation, and there are probably limited options for monetizing their acquisition without charging customers for things they used to get for free.

As Dharmesh would say, if I were a betting man, and I am, I'd give two to one odds they start charging for services that are currently free in the next eighteen months.

This, of course, would open up the opportunity for someone to fly in underneath them. They probably expect that, but of course in the short term there will be a win because it will take time for that person to get the word out.

So I whipped up a quick weebly site: http://everydnsforever.weebly.com/

Submit your email address there if you'd like to get one email if and only if (a) EveryDNS becomes less free than it is today, and (b) a credible, great, free service is created in EveryDNS's place.

(By making this site I am hoping to do my part to increase the cost to Dyn Inc. of changing EveryDNS. Thanks!)

(Edit: grammar.)

Update: thanks to rbritton it seems like http://freedns.afraid.org is a good alternative.

So, if you sign up you'll probably just get a link to http://freedns.afraid.org if/when EveryDNS changes some or all of its services to paid only.

while there are many such free services I have found, I've still not managed to find one that supports the addition of reverse dns lookups. anyone aware of such as sevice?

I think Dyn will make a good parent. We started using their "enterprise" DNS service Dynect recently and it's very good. Highly reliable, great UI, polished product. I've been using EveryDNS for personal stuff for years and am happy to see it get more attention.

Congrats davidu!

Thanks. 9 years is a long time to run a service, and I'm happy to fully focus my efforts at OpenDNS and some non-DNS related interests I have (yes, I have them).

David,

Am I supposed to move my 15 domains now? What's gonna happen?

From http://www.everydns.com/acquisition.php:

1) Will my DNS service be interrupted?

Absolutely not. While we're working to transition services over to the Dyn infrastructure, we will do everything possible to ensure it's a seamless and painless transition for you.

2) Do I have to do anything or make any changes?

Nope. You will be given plenty of notice if you have to do anything. But in the short term, nothing is changing.

3) Will the service remain free?

While we don't 100% have the answer to that yet, we will not be making any changes to the service you are currently receiving for the foreseeable future. We will be discontinuing signups in the near future but existing accounts will remain active and fully functional.

Discontinuing signups = first step in migrating to paid-only.

If they're admitting they'll be discontinuing signups now, then paid-only service is, at most, 6-12 months away.

Are there any alternatives?

I highly doubt DynDNS would let EveryDNS remain free when it would cannibalize their own $30 a year/domain business model,

http://freedns.afraid.org

fyi, freedns won't allow you to set mx records pointing away from your domain, so (for instance) you can't use google apps for your domain.

belay that, it was just a confusing error message. fyi, don't leave a trailing '.' on the mx records (even though google explicitly instructs you to).

I learned about this from E-mail sent to me from EveryDNS; I have several domains managed there. The mail said that the creators of EveryDNS were familiar with Dyn and thought of well of them, so I'm trying to be optimistic.

DynDNS is my registrar of choice, and they do a very good job of making management easy. However, their DNS services are most definitely NOT free as is EveryDNS. It'll be interesting to see if that changes or not.

I hope EveryDNS keeps it's dead simple interface and doesn't get integrated with Dyn...

Some more info http://www.everydns.com/acquisition.php

I might be missing something here, but isn't David Ulevitch affiliated with OpenDNS which should be more than capable of running everydns? Its maybe not their primary function, but its pretty close.

I'm CEO of OpenDNS and wanted to put the overly neglected EveryDNS service in more capable hands.

Simply adopting it into OpenDNS didn't make sense for all kinds of strategic and positioning reasons, amongst others.

Now somebody will actually respond to support requests for the first time in years!

That doesn't jive with my experiences with EveryDNS. Only recently based on a random tweet (not directed at him) David contacted me offering to bulk change the master for a stack of zones.

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