Comment by KuraFire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KuraFire | Hacker News Reader

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I checked out this site the moment it got linked on Twitter, but I haven’t been able to connect to it still. I asked on Twitter, and it seems quite a few people are having issues connecting to it:

http://twitter.com/#!/search/%40KuraFire

For a CDN, having a home page not work for so many people is a serious problem. If it just recently had its DNS changed, then it shouldn’t have been announced, period. If not that, this connectivity is even more concerning.

I’m really excited about seeing dedicated JS CDNs for things like Modernizr (which I lead/run), but a CDN that has such a troublesome start will need to prove itself a couple times over before I can consider it seriously. Mainly, this kind of start doesn’t inspire confidence that the people running it know every little thing there is to know about hosting and DNS. The fact that one of the three examples in this thread, linked by who appears to be the creator of the site, doesn’t actually work, makes me even more concerned.

I’m all for seeing Modernizr and other JS scripts on a CDN, but the CDN should work for that, so I hope that this one gets its act together real soon. Whatever the cause, being largely unavailable for a lot of people in a lot of different countries is obviously unacceptable as a CDN resource—even if it may be only temporary.

I am also very excited to see a CDN for the smaller libraries.

The service seems to be hosted on Amazon which is great and gives me a vote of confidence in using the service. Also very cheap to pull off something like this and with community donations are very possible solution.

It's disappointing to see the propagation errors but I have personally worked with the Amazon back end and CNAME records and recall the same issues when I sent a site live. Hard to test how your site works around the globe especially when third party tools report that its working.

This is why it’s always better to get some real world testing done, rather than third-party tools. Ask people of whom you know are in various locations around the world to see how fast things are (and if they’re not working at all, that’ll become evident right away). Get data from the grindstone through other people if you can’t get it on your own (e.g. if you’re a small team in only one location).

DNS is a fickle bitch, but it’s also one that is the easiest to take care of before launch: just wait. (though if after 3 days it’s still not working, you messed it up)

Thanks for the feedback KuraFire!

We did stuff up the launch of this service. We should have thoroughly vetted DNS propagation before we launched. We plan to learn from this, and will ensure anything we do in the future has much more rigorous testing.

Please accept our humble apologies.

We're working on resolving current issues as we speak.

Well, better to have a troubled start due to insufficient DNS testing than having hosting/DNS issues along the way. You probably should’ve just waited with getting the word out (>72 hours after the DNS change), but eagerness/enthusiasm is understandable—even if not necessarily desired at all times ;)

I'll be keeping an eye out on how it goes, and should we deem it reliable enough later on, we'll link to it from the Modernizr site. Feel free to let me know at some point in the future when you feel you've resolved all issues.

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