

Our startup EntryDNS a free DNS management service - clyfe
http://entrydns.net/pages/home

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eroded
If it's totally free, how will you make money? Where's the business?

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clyfe
We'll be working on some premium features which will be charged a lot lower
than competition. Most core features will be free tough! So we're going
towards a freemium model.

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maratd
Can you please elaborate on the features you guys consider premium?

> REST API for power users to update/change DNS records

Is there documentation for this? I was only able to find how to update an IP
address. What about adding domains/sub-domains through the API, etc?

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clyfe
Is not yet documented, but yes, our REST api supports all operations on zones
and records and is ActiveResource-compatible

<http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveResource/Base.html>

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johnny22
You should add support for SRV records. I know i personally couldn't use this
unless you did.

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pagekalisedown
SPF too.

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pacopablo
Since an SPF record is actually a TXT record, they already support SPF

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perssontm
Looks good, although the previous mentioned point of your revenuestream is a
big questionmark, I'd rather pay 1USD/domain or whatever to know it will stick
around.

I tried looking at your ns-servers for the screenshot-
example(100armstrong.biz) but that seemed fake. Your own domain are using:

answer: entrydns.net 3600 NS ns3.serveriai.lt answer: entrydns.net 3600 NS
ns4.serveriai.lt answer: entrydns.net 3600 NS ns1.serveriai.lt answer:
entrydns.net 3600 NS ns2.serveriai.lt

Checking what serveriai.lt is makes me wonder how stable that can be. Not
beeing from .lt its hard to know if thats a thrustworthy provider. I would
suggest you put a few examples ns-records for the domains that will be hosted
by you, and perhaps an action plan for failures at any of those, or a
nameserver upstream. A good addition might also be to show how geographically
distributed your ns-servers are, and perhaps give users a few options so they
can make sure theres always a nsserver within the same country or continent as
most of the users.

Your upcoming feature-list looks really interesting and something that could
be well suited as a paid-for-option.

Good luck!

Edit: got some more ideas after posting

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msumpter
I quickly setup an account to see how many name servers you are offering.
There only appear to be two primary name servers that are within the same
netblock. Both IPs appear to be announced by the same ASN from the same
location.

So your clients are one medium level denial of service attack away from a
complete outage.

Doing your own IP anycast requires some heavy investments but sometimes you
can work with providers that have multiple locations to setup anycast in their
IP block.

Denial of service attacks are something you just deal with when you offer low
cost or free services like these. You are going to have a lot of unsavory
types register and start hosting sites from your name servers; and even after
you terminate the record your name server still has to deal with responding
with NXDOMAIN.

~~~
zooz
Thanks for the feedback.

We're aware of that and we're working on it. The first goal is to create a
well-tested and stable platform which we can improve over time with a help of
feedback like yours. We do not expect people to start moving their critical
services onto our NS servers.

Thanks again!

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dsl
A DNS service with any type of free tier of service does not work. They have
been tried dozens of times before (including by me), and never work out over
the long term.

Your number one problem will be abuse. 50% of your user base will be the
hacker/hobbyist types you expect, the other 50% will be people who can't get
DNS service elsewhere (MLM/Ponzi schemes, child porn, jihadist forums and
propaganda sites). These types of sites will generate tons of inbound
complaints which you need to deal with, as well as massive DDoS attacks which
you will need to sink to avoid service disruptions (think $100k+ in hardware
plus bandwidth costs).

If you are crazy enough to move forward, you should reach out to dnsbl.org,
its a shared database of domains to deny service to.

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grimen
Nice too see a free alternative, even though I suspect it won't feel reliable
in practice for serious sites, though I'm hardly an expert on this topic so I
better leave that to experts.

What I could say though is that I'm after 6 months of usage very sold on
DNSimple, those guys just rock and it's a few bucks per month - read: nothing
- and updates records fast-as-*, instant support, even for obscure things as
"the great firewall"-issues, etc. For those that want to pick a safe card.

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windexh8er
Why would anyone sign up? No SSL and no security rationale talked about
anywhere within the site. DNS isn't just for fun and games, the site doesn't
exude much confidence in security as a development component.

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IgorPartola
What will your service have over dns.he.net?

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clyfe
Well some things I can think of are: friendly user interface, simple API and
complete REST API compatible with many programming platforms, lower TTL
values, instant updates, and several advanced features we plan to release
soon.

~~~
IgorPartola
A few thoughts:

* Your minimum TTL is 60 seconds, but you only learn this by trying to set it to something lower

* I actually like Hurricate Electric's interface better: there is much less clicking to do. Their updates are also instant.

* You lack IPv6 support (both AAAA record types and, from what I can tell, IPv6 connectivity). This is really important and would be a blocking issue for me.

* The REST API is something HE doesn't seem to have so good job there.

* You don't have HTTPS available, yet you have a authentication and management system. This is broken and would be another blocking issue for using your service. <rant>Browsers should display a big fat warning next to each <input type="password" /> field that is not served over HTTPS. In 2011, not having HTTPS set up should be a #1 bug.</rant>

Otherwise, looks pretty cool. If HE ever changes their services, stops being
awesome, I will keep you guys in mind.

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zooz
True. Totally agreed. We are aware of the mentioned issues and will be solving
this in the near future.

Thanks for the feedback tho!

~~~
IgorPartola
No problem and best of luck.

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clyfe
Please give any constructive criticism!

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nknight
Here's one: You need to tell us why we should expect EntryDNS to exist in six
months.

With no apparent revenue source, I have to assume EntryDNS will drop off the
face of the earth at any moment, never to be seen again. That's not something
I'm prepared to spend time putting a critical piece of infrastructure into.

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arkitaip
I'm thinking exactly the same thing and wouldn't use this service for anything
except testing. I'm assuming that your business model is freemium but even so
you need to write a couple of reassuring words about the mium part of your
business to reassure concerned potential customers.

~~~
clyfe
The same answer I gave to eroded: we'll be going towards a freemium model -
keeping core features free, and for advanced "enterprise" needs, go for fees
lower than other services. We plan to stick around for a lot of time to come.

