I was a happy customer for years, but felt they were not good on past promises about the pricing. Moved to GCP and slashed my monthly bill to a 1/5 of what I was paying to DNSimple. Still with GCP today (for DNS).
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.
What does this refer to? (It sounds like servers, and those are certainly not getting more expensive.)
A couple years ago they migrated me to a more expensive plan with no notice, I had to catch the price difference on an invoice. I wasn’t happy but it’s a lot of work to transfer domains.
Recently I discovered they introduced a plan that fit my usage and cost 50% less, but (would you believe it) they didn’t bother quietly migrating me to that plan…
These guys can’t be trusted.
Seems a little odd to be surprised when a business that (by the author's own admission in this case) seems to have an established history of customer hostile actions.
[1] https://porkbun.com/.
Porkbun is pretty good, too, but their margin is smaller and domain protection is less of a thing for them.
Google and Cloudflare are very cheap (because it's hard to make money on a dollar profit margin per year) but they're very big companies, so customer service is not quite the same as at a small company.
Cloudflare also isn't a general purpose registrar - they won't let you point to external nameservers which makes migration bad.
EasyDNS doesn't support U2F.
Google... the usual risk of getting banned for some youtube upload and losing all your domains.
I switched to DNSimple after several Gandi fiascos. I'm not a reseller, and the fast that they charge a fee made me hope they wouldn't try to skim in other places, but I'd be happy to know of a registrar that checks all the boxes (box 1: u2f, box 2: no glaring technical issues).
I might be missing something here, but why do you feel that this particular service is worth highlighting? Genuinely asking because maybe there's something I'm not aware of. I was under the impression that most popular registrars have procedures in place to prevent this kind of things. To transfer a domain, I usually have to unlock it and/or provide some kind of transfer activation code, I get an email, then there's some transfer waiting period.
How do people get their domains stolen these days that would make EasyDNS's customer support particularly stellar in that regard?
Now it does.
Updating DNS records sometimes don't work (random webui errors, sometimes even in french)
"to 2x" = "to double"
"to 5x" = "to quintuple".
Just noticed his blog's tagline... I think terrible grammar is poor UX too. =]
Also, when someone is barely satisfied with the current offerings, something like this would be the impetus needed to do something new.
[1] posthog.com/sales
It's someone trying to squeeze more revenues quickly and by doing so, damaging their brand / reputation.
Glad to have a family-member in this crazy tech world. Rising costs, worsening products, sorry to hear of your predicament.
