easyDNS Blog

I've fielded a handful of queries from members about the coming DNS usage quotas. Some have looked at the "query usage" links beside their domain names and are surprised at the numbers they are seeing.

One thing to be aware of is that we've discovered that the January numbers were tabulated incorrectly and are too high. To gain a truer insight into your usage, look at the January 28th figure. We are currently running a process to fix up the stats to reflect actual usage and expect to have those online within the next couple of days.

But I'd like to take an opportunity to convey the following principles behind this to our member base:

We will soon be launching our new member interface, a ground up rewrite of the current members.easydns.com website. It has been a long time in coming, like all complex projects, it always goes over-budget and takes longer than expected.

The current user interface works, but it's pretty stale. There are so many layers of upgrades, fixes and plugins underneath the UI you see when you log in, that it's hit the point of diminishing returns: every time we add a feature or commit a bugfix, it seems to break something else. Despite the fact that most people dislike change, especially user interface changes, it is time to move on to the next level for easyDNS.

The other day I stumbled across http://appsto.re, a DNS client domain which is a pretty useful specialized URL shortener for iPhone apps.

A good example is easyDNS' own iPhone app for easyWhois. The iTunes URL is loooooooooooooong and cumbersome, and to be honest, I can't readily remember what shortened URL I created for it on easyURL (I think maybe http://easyurl.net/easyiphone?)

Well with appsto.re, we know it's simply http://appsto.re/easyWhois, and you can view the info for any given app by using http://appsto.re/info/easyWhois.

You can even create your own custom shortened URLs for any given iPhone app.

The other interesting thing about appsto.re that distinguishes it from most of the other URL shorteners out there, is that it actually has a revenue model, since I imagine they can use affiliate links to redirect to the paid apps (sorry guys, our app is free).

We've changed the glue record in the roots for ns3.easydns.org to reference a different node while we debug the data syncing issue.

Some queries are still coming in owing to DNS cache issues. If you recently updated your zone and that update has not been reflected in ns3.easydns.org then you could also consider removing ns3.easydns.org from your DNS delegation.

ns3 is a stand-alone node (we will be phasing out the stand-alone noded in the new year), as long as you have the ns1 and ns2 anycast strands in your delegation, you can safely remove ns3 from the delegation.

The main easyDNS member's interface at https://members.easydns.com and public facing website are currently experiencing database communications issues and are offline.

Systems personnel are onsite now and we hope to have things back to normal ASAP.

In the meantime, easyDNS production systems - DNS, URL forwarding, email forwarding, etc. are unaffected.

We will post updates accordingly and we are sorry for the outage.