

Zerigo terminates annual plans mid-way to jack rates 19x - pardner

aka &quot;How NOT to raise your prices on prepaid plans&quot;<p>The last few years have been rough for Zerigo customers, with several well-publicized DNS outages.<p>As a reward for hanging in there, Zerigo sent an email this morning they will discontinued their DNS Essentials plan ($39&#x2F;YEAR) and are replacing it January 31 2014 with a $63&#x2F;MONTH plan. (pricing shown for 50 domains)...a 19-fold increase, one month&#x27;s notice.<p>And no, they just confirmed, they will NOT wait until your current annual plan expires even though it is pre-paid (September 2014 in my case).<p>They will jack up the rate 19-fold, beginning Jan 31, applying a prorated credit, rather than letting current annual plans run their course.<p>To my mind, the rate increase might be reasonable if they really did upgrade their infrastructure to prevent further outages.<p>What is completely unacceptable IMO is a policy to terminate existing pre-paid plans mid-way rather than grandfather existing customers through the remaining months of their term.
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rychdev
I JUST upgraded from free to DNS Essentials a couple days ago. I've notified
Zerigo billing that I consider the change a cancellation of my service
agreement "without a determination of misuse" as defined by their own terms of
service, and have requested a full refund back to my card on file. We'll see
how that goes.

So where is everybody moving? Any reasonably priced DNS providers that don't
suck?

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lachlanj
We use DynDNS and couldn't be happier. We were tossing up between using then
and Zerigo, glad we went with Dyn now!

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pardner
Only DynDns top-tier products allow zone file importing (one of the features
that sold us on Zerigo in the first place since we have 50 domains). And those
packages start at $300/mo AND have a 1 year non-refundable contract.

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enko
Got the email as well. I would be looking at a new price of $456/yr, up from
my current $39/yr. Needless to say that is totally unacceptable.

Thing is I wouldn't even mind paying a little bit more, I know $39/yr is
pretty cheap. $60/yr would be fine, or even more maybe. But $456/yr is not
fine at all and it baffles me why they would even attempt this. Did it occur
to no-one to ask, hm, do you think our customers will mind us jacking the
price 10-fold or higher?

Looking into a switch to dnsmadeeasy. Even if they reverse course, I'll
probably change now, since Zerigo management has obviously gone mad and I no
longer trust them to run a service I rely on.

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dangrossman
Is there a reason not to use the DNS provided free by reliable web hosts
(Rackspace, Softlayer, Linode, etc)? Or is everyone in this discussion hosting
with Amazon and the like that doesn't provide that?

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pardner
We found Godaddy's free dns service was causing a noticeable number of random
"website not found" errors. While it might have been mitigated by adding a
secondary dns provider we decided to find a more robust primary dns solution
plus a secondary dns provider.

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denishennessy
They charged me $39 for annual service 4 days ago. Then today they mailed me
to tell me that the 'new' rate was $756/year and I would have to pay the extra
or cancel the service.

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pardner
Looking hard at dnsmadeeasy... Anyone using them as primary DNS? Basic specs
look good: $60/YR for 25 domains ... supports zone imports... uptime
guarantee.

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StuntPope
easyDNS.

Yes, I'm biased, but still. We're less money, anycast deployed (Zerigo until
now is/was not), zonefile importer, REST API, full integration to Amazon Route
53 via easyRoute53, etc etc.

Prices starting at $149/year for 10 domains.

Add failover / host monitoring: $299/year, 10 domains

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pardner
I looked at easyDNS couple of years ago, at that time did not allow reverse
lookups for PTR records, but it looks like they do now. Worth a look for sure,
thanks.

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trafficlight
Yep. Time to do something different.

I just did this last year when another DNS provider pulled the same shit.

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pardner
Sad thing is, I'd actually stick with them if they were grandfathering pre-
paid plans. Not doing so is mind-blowingly arrogant.

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whichdan
Did they offer a refund, or just credit?

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pardner
The note I got from support says: "A pro-rated credit will be applied for any
unused portion of your existing plan towards the new service."

That said, since they are choosing to break a pre-paid annual agreement I
presume one can demand and get a pro-rated refund.

~~~
pardner
got a new note from zerigo support saying they will refund after cancel: "If
you are on an annual or quarterly plan and do not wish to continue with Zerigo
service, you are eligible for a pro-rated refund after you cancel your
service."

