so as a long-time everydns.com user, i’ve been relatively happy with the service that i’ve received from them. i think that i have experienced two major outages that i can recall, the most recent one occurring a few weeks ago shortly after dyn.com announced that they had acquired everydns.
recently, i was emailed an announcement about what’s next for everydns users. to be fair, i have never donated to everydns and so i really shouldn’t have such high expectations from a service provider that is giving me something for free.
Leeching Using their services has been great for me, and sure, it wouldn’t have hurt me to donate some money to the cause. but there’s a reason why i didn’t donate: i could have gotten the same free service through my registrar.
so why use everydns anyway, then? i wanted the freedom to be able to move my DNS seamlessly if i decided to change registrars. that luxury seemed nice, though i haven’t switched from godaddy.com since i have gotten there.
the latest announcement from dyn.com says that anyone who has donated to the everydns will get grandfathered into free lifetime subscriptions of the custom dns product. but that statement begs the question: what about people who haven’t donated to everydns?
i get that dyn.com is a company (one with terrific customer support, by the way) and they need to make money, but acquiring a service provider of free DNS and then charging people for service just feels wrong to me. i was trying to figure out how dyn.com would generate revenue from this acquisition, but i always assumed that they would just upsell services.
they haven’t explicitly said that if you haven’t donated in the past, you’re going to be out of luck, but reading between the lines, that’s the sense that i get. and if that is the way that it is moving, i gotta say, it was great while everydns lasted, but i guess it’s really time to move on.
my DNS is already hosted at my registrar, so i’m not really impacted terribly by this, but it’s a sad state of affairs to see the spirit of such a great free service die.
First off let me say that I/we greatly appreciate this thoughtful response to our acquisition of EveryDNS. We’ll be sure to keep you all up-to-date with our plans moving forward. Right now our focus is to get EveryDNS on our infrastructure so we can support the service. We’ve gotten a lot of questions regarding our plans for the free users at EveryDNS. To be honest, we’re still hammering out those details, so constructive feedback like this goes a long way.
i’m glad to hear that there is still hope for everydns users. from the tone of @davidu’s message on everydns about the acquisition, i had assumed that some kind of free dns service would continue to exist.
like i said, i know dyn.com is trying to run a business, but it was the @davidu’s determination to provide a quality free service and the spirit of everydns that i found so admirable.