I really hope they get manage to recover it. I grew up surfing in Central Florida and even I knew about it and had seen pictures of it. I finally went there a few years ago and it was a blast to see people surfing it.
I think this was meant in jest, but Florida is not that wide on the peninsula. You can drive from Clearwater to Cocoa Beach (the entire width from west to east) in about 2.5-3 hours. So if you live in the middle like near Orlando or Gainesville, you just...drive an hour to go surfing.
Founder and CEO of DNSimple here. I'd like to clarify a couple of things about our business that may shed some light on why we've ended certain legacy plans when we have.
There are two key parts to our business: domain registration management and authoritative DNS. These two parts have very different price models in the industry. For domains, you pay a fee for each year they are registered. For DNS, you pay for each zone and then for the DNS queries.
The price changes around domain registrations have not been coming from us, rather registry operators have been raising many of their wholesale prices repeatedly in recent years. The operator for .COM even showed up in the news recently when Senator Warren called for an investigation into Versign for the price changes around that TLD. We’ve either kept domain prices stable for as long as we could, or even reduced them, as long as we were able to retain some small margin.
The price changes around operational DNS stems from the rising prices of infrastructure as well as changes by our vendors for various services related to DNS operations. Last year we overhauled our pricing to try to remain competitive in the DNS operational space by reducing minimum requirements (you can register domains with us and use another DNS provider which is something you could not do with our previous pricing model) and by aligning to actual costs (we were not charging for queries for a long time, but we are being charged for queries for things like DDoS defense and edge caching, so we had to update our prices to reflect these changes).
Operating a business means you have to keep at least 3 groups happy: the customers, the team, and the owners. Many times I have to make a decision that will make someone unhappy, and it sucks, but I do it to ensure we can continue operating and keep providing service to those that see value in what we offer. This is one of those cases. From the operational DNS perspective, our Basic Reseller plan has been operating at a loss for the last few years, so it had to ultimately go.
To Cory and any other customer who feels we did not communicate well on the changes: I’m sorry. I assure you we have tried over and over through emails and one-on-one conversations to explain why these changes were necessary. I, and the entire DNSimple team, have always been very open with any customer that is frustrated with changes we’ve made, and we will continue to do so. If you ever want to talk to me about DNSimple, my inbox is always open.
We run a combination of managed hardware and virtual hardware. The prices for both have indeed gone up significantly since we launched some of our earliest plans. We don't have the luxury of using a cloud provider like AWS for our Anycast DNS infrastructure, thus we are limited to our choices. Furthermore the cost for network transit has gone up, as has the cost of ancillary services we use to operate our network (such as tooling for alerting, observability, etc).
blah blah blah blah fuck you is how your response comes off.
At least now I know to warn my clients away if they mention you.
Uh, good luck with trying to get people to spend time to listen to your elaborate explanation as to why it's not your company's fault it's being shitty.
No one likes long paragraphs of weasel words. Customers want the straight dope. This isn't complicated. It can be explained with fewer words that are far less condescending.
If your business model is so poor that you have to screw your customers over, perhaps you should try car sales. I think you would be good at that. You are not good at this.
CEO of DNSimple here. We have not changed the prices for any existing customers with active subscriptions, nor do we plan on changing them in the near future. We have adjusted our pricing for new customers and prior customers who resubscribe.
With our new plans we offer zones for $2 per month for unlimited query volume whereas Amazon charges $0.50 for each zone, plus $0.40 for the first million queries + $0.20 for each million queries thereafter. We will likely also eventually have to charge by query volume because there are real costs with operating our DNS network. One of the reasons we have not yet talked about what we will do with existing plans is because we do not know for sure what the optimal pricing will be with query volumes involved.
Cloudflare is something altogether different and frankly is hard to compete with based on price as they are subsidising their free tier with by charging business customers at a much higher amount (I can say this from experience).
In terms of where we are headed to differentiate ourselves from other domain management services, the new features we've been launching should make that clear. For example, you can now manage Route 53 zones from within DNSimple (https://blog.dnsimple.com/2023/06/manage-aws-routes-in-dnsim...) as well as CoreDNS zones for on-premise DNS, as well as see your GoDaddy domains in DNSimple as well (with management coming in the upcoming months).
For any existing customer that wants to switch to the new plan, we've made that easy to do (for example if you have one zone it'll be cheaper in the Solo plan). For customers that resubscribe and need to select a new plan, they are always welcome to reach out to us at support at dnsimple dot com and we will be happy to work with them to find a solution that works for them.
CEO of DNSimple here. We have indeed rolled out new plans for new customers. Anyone on an existing plan will be able to keep there current plan for now, although we will likely migrate everyone to the new plan sets within 12 to 18 months from now.
Our goal with the DNS zone pricing is to bring it in line with what folks are paying for similar service at the major cloud providers. When it comes to authoritative DNS, our operational environment has changed for us in the last couple of years, and what was once a reasonable fixed price is no longer. We're paying for DDoS defense by query volume, and as such we need to move towards a pricing model that covers that. By making the pricing the same across all of our plans, we can also focus on making our DNS better for everyone, not just for our higher tier plans.
Hopefully this helps clarify a bit on why we are introducing new plans. We still have a few more changes to make before the year is out, which is one of the reasons why we have not introduced any timeline for phasing out our old plans, allowing customers who are on them to continue with their current pricing for the time being.
Feel free to reach out to support at dnsimple dot com if you have any other questions, we're happy to answer.
Yes, yes, yes! We've wanted to build a connector for them for a while now, but so far, there's no API to pull the appropriate DNS records to automate setup of DKIM.
IMO this is an API that should be implemented on your end (dnsimple), not theirs. There are a relatively small number of DNS providers which all provide essentially the same interface (CRUD operations on records), but there are a huge number of services that need to set up DNS records, including open source projects self-hosted by many individuals. It's not realistic for DNS providers to implement integration with every possible service, but the opposite is totally doable.
If dnsimple implemented something like DomainConnect, Fastmail could easily integrate. And it's a win-win because it sends traffic your way.
As I said, I found[0] DomainConnect to not be a good fit for open source projects in its current form. I've done some work on a new protocol which you can learn more about here[1]. Would be interested to hear your thoughts from the perspective of a DNS provider.
A quick dnsimple / fastmail question, what is the purpose of the _client._smtp SRV record in you fastmail template? The only thing I can find about it seems like a draft rfc standard that was never finalized. FastMail definitely doesn't have any info on it in their support pages.
DNSimple was founded as a fully remote company in 2010 with the goal of making DNS and domain management simple for everyone. We offer a customer friendly user interface, a simple to use API, and operate critical infrastructure for our customers to provide reliable, trustworthy services. Our team continuously innovates, enhances, and releases new features for our customers to make their domain management effortless.
I wonder if they are using tooling that doesn't properly retain DNSKEY records for DS that recently removed? This is one of the reasons we perform controlled automated key rotation and removal in DNSimple, so that we can ensure we retain the keys in the authoritative zone on each key rollover giving the DS records time to expire from caches.
