Comment by iudqnolq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iudqnolq | Hacker News Reader

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> Setup up monitoring on your critical domains. UptimeRobot and Hetrixtools are good starters with generous free tier. You should know when your website/email/dns isn't working.

Lesson learned :)

> Don't tie your domain registration with your DNS provider. You lose everything if something goes wrong with your account.

I don't see how that helps. How do I recover from my registrar deleting/disabling my account even if DNS is somewhere else? I think there's still only one failure point and the lesson is that I need to pay that failure point more money.

> Be able to jump ship easily, have backups of your zone,

Luckily I have that

> already know where you will transfer to.

Any suggestions? Ironically I recently moved from Google Domains to Cloudflare because I was worried about issues with opaque support. I've learned my lesson picking based on cost alone, but I'm a college student who can't afford something too heavy-duty.

>I don't see how that helps. How do I recover from my registrar deleting/disabling my account even if DNS is somewhere else? I think there's still only one failure point and the lesson is that I need to pay that failure point more money.

Your outage was a DNS outage, not a registrar outage. If you still had control of the domain you could update your name servers to another provider, import your backed up records and get the site back online without talking to CloudFlare.

> Your outage was a DNS outage, not a registrar outage. If you still had control of the domain you could update your name servers to another provider, import your backed up records and get the site back online without talking to CloudFlare.

I believe it was both.

If I have a registrar outage I'm hosed. If I don't have a registrar outage and do have a DNS outage I can recover with a little work. But in the only case I can recover my registrar was reliable, so why didn't I just have them do DNS as well?

> But in the only case I can recover my registrar was reliable, so why didn't I just have them do DNS as well?

Because they have just proved being uncapable of doing it? Because redundancy? Because you shouldn't keep all your eggs in the same basket.

I've been self hosting for at least 15 years and did not have any huge problems like the domain becoming non resolvable. I would never host my DNS on my registrar's infrastructure. It's being sloppy and lazy and it gets you embarassed.

A domain registered at a provider (but not DNS) can be down with no impact to your domain, so long as the domain is still in the TLD root servers, everything will keep going.

Thank you for teaching me something new. I didn't know that got cached.

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