Very surprising so many people use Godaddy for their DNS, given it is very slow as far as DNS servers go. I've been running a Pingdom speed/reliability test for a few popular DNS servers for the past few months, and here is the data:
Guide:
<dns provider> <uptime %> <downtime> <outages> <avg speed>
October:
Godaddy DNS 100.00% 0h 00m 00s 0 68 ms
Dynect SMB 100.00% 0h 00m 00s 0 31 ms
DNSMadeEasy 100.00% 0h 00m 00s 0 39 ms
November:
Godaddy DNS 100.00% 0h 00m 00s 0 67 ms
Dynect SMB 100.00% 0h 00m 00s 0 26 ms
DNSMadeEasy 99.98% 0h 10m 00s 1 43 ms
December:
Godaddy DNS 99.99% 0h 05m 00s 1 58 ms
Dynect SMB 100.00% 0h 00m 00s 0 28 ms
DNSMadeEasy 99.00% 7h 25m 00s 22 40 ms
So basically Godaddy DNS is reliable but slow, DNSMadeEasy is relatively fast but had some uptime troubles in December, and Dynect (Dyn Inc) is fast + super reliable.
As for pricing:
- Godaddy DNS is free (I think?)
- DNSMadeEasy runs about $2-5/month (max of 10 million queries/month)
- Dynect SMB runs between $30-95/month depending on what you need (max of 1.8 million queries/month)
Maybe for YC 2011 we could have a start up compete with GoDaddy. If some one started a trustworthy domain register targeted at start ups I could see it doing well.
This report actually checked an average of all name servers on Pingdom for a month.
The full posting said:
I have been really down on Dynect because of their sales approach and their in-the-face cocky attitude. My very few interactions with them have been to immediately put down companies and competitors with complete BS statements.
But I have seen many people say how great the performance is. So did a pingdom test for all of their servers (used Twitter) and I did a test for all of my name servers on DNS Made Easy.
These are averages for "ALL" name servers.
DNS Made Easy:
Avg. Response Time
34 ms
Slowest avg. response time
58 ms
Fastest avg. response time
23 ms
Dynect:
Avg. Response Time
37 ms
Slowest avg. response time
59 ms
Fastest avg. response time
27 ms
Now Pingdom only does US and Europe testing... nothing in Asia where is looks like Dynect is stronger. But their network is no where as strong as they say it is. I have done as many trace routes as possible and I can never get a query answered in their singapore or australia locations.
So really... I do not get it.... Where is Dynect faster? Now I know this is only for the past month.... but really.... I think DNS Made Easy runs a hell of a network and they are a fraction of the Dynect guys (whom I have negative feelings about anyway).
Looking at tools like www.dnscomparison.com it looks like DNSMadeEasy is fastest some weeks, Dynect is fast other weeks, UltraDNS is faster some other weeks. Of course I'm not sure how "honest" this is as well.
But create a pingdom account... do some tests... be interested in seeing other results.
So far I say that DNSMadeEasy is as fast or faster then the ones that are many times more expensive.
Yes the pricing is just ridiculous.... I never knew that the Dynect SMB went over 600k... they must have just increased that recently.... But $95 per month for 1.8 million queries.... INSANE!!! and now Amazon Route 53 is 50 cents per million queries..... they are going to eat everyone's lunch!
Nope, it was just these 3 (as we were deciding between DNSMadeEasy and Dynect, and wanted to throw Godaddy in there for comparison).
Although we currently use DNSMadeEasy, and due to the uptime issues we might be looking to switch at which point I'll cast a broader net. Of course if you have a pingdom account, setting up these DNS checks is quite easy. They have a special monitoring type just for DNS.
What uptime issues? We have used DNS Made Easy for over 8 years and have never seen any uptime problems at all. Checking one name server through Pingdom is not giving you a detailed review of name servers. You could have checked another name server in Dynect and they could of had twice as much downtime... but still Dynect was up.
Showing one name server is good, but it is not judging a providers "downtime". Would be much more useful if you tested all name servers. If several were down at once then yes... there is a good chance that you could loose a query.
Well to be completely fair to DNSMadeEasy, this failure wasn't necessarily their entire service, it was just the one nameserver pingdom was testing, ns10.dnsmadeeasy.com. However, both GoDaddy and Dynect were tested using just one nameserver, so the comparison is fair.
Our company (Gamador) is listed as hosting from "Global Net Access LLC" which I had never heard of - we just use Linode. So there might be some Linode undercounting going on.
Okay! I've updated my chart. Companies that are using Linode should be accurately reported now.
This is mostly thanks to the suggestion from HN user jedsmith. I've updated my script to incorporate what should be a more accurate way of determining the name of an organization that owns a particular IP address.
Yes, there's something very strange here when there are ~6 companies using Linode for DNS but only one for hosting - I'm happy to be corrected but I'd be quite surprised if people use Linode DNS without also using the hosting.
It looks like this is considering only the root domain, and for App Engine hosted sites this would probably be an external server not hosted by Google that just redirects you to the www subdomain (where you'd have your CNAME to ghs.google.com), so they wouldn't show up as such.
I think a large part of this has to do with programming language choice. I suspect there is a large group of ruby hackers out there who can only use Amazon, and not GAE.
A survey of language choice by YC companies would be interesting - I think Python is actually very well represented.
I'd guess that the reason people aren't using AppEngine is more that it's strategically a pretty bad idea. You can't move off it, and its constraints have a major effect on how you design and architect your application. When you're still figuring out what your product is, using a platform that requires you to design your data storage to fit the queries you are going to run isn't necessarily that smart.
Wasn't data access very slow up until recently? From the outside I question how important GAE is to Google, has it got a decent sized team behind it and will it always be around. With Amazon cloud hosting seems much more of a key business. Of course this is from the outside if I were considering options, I don't use either of them.
I'm surprised not to see more alternatives to GoDaddy for registrars (say, NameCheap.) GoDaddy interface and upselling are simply infuriating and I've always thought of it as a "Wal-Mart for domains/etc," not something a tech-savvy startup would use.
I find this chart fascinating - though I'm wondering how much of Rackspace is Rackspace "Cloud" and how much of Rackspace is "VPS". Also, I'm embarrassed to admit that I'd never heard of SoftLayer as a server hosting company - I wonder what the attraction there is.
For Web Hosts it comes (roughly) to:
o Amazon EC2
o Rackspace Cloud
o Self Hosted (Surprisingly large number)
o Slicehost
o Hurricane Electric (which is likely self hosted? EDIT (per jedsmith) Linode?)
Two things I found very, very surprising.
#1 - Small use of Linode
#2 - How much Rackspace is used more than Slicehost.
Anybody care to comment on why SoftLayer is so predominant?
SoftLayer is a superb dedicated hosting provider--maybe the best. They have a competent staff, several datacenters all over the US, a very good, low-latency network (public and private), high-quality management tools, super high uptime and QOS, and fair pricing.
So if you want to run on bare metal, but you don't want to rack servers yourself, they're a compelling option.
(I'm [email protected], and as you can see from the spreadsheet, we use softlayer)
We we have worked with many providers, including all of those listed.
We continue to recommend Softlayer for leased dedicated hardware needs because of the features they provide, and the solid network infrastructure (although they do have hiccups on occasion).
Softlayer has a great support team, fast server deployment (1-2 hours) and full management capabilities - power strip reboot, IPMI KVM, OS reloads, etc..
I wouldn't trust Softlayer with my clients' data. Look at what happened to SimpleCDN and others. In a matter of a couple of days Softlayer pulled the plug on all their servers. SimpleCDN was erased from the CDN map. They used to have over 100 servers with them.
We've hosted our site at SoftLayer since 2006 and trust them with our customers' data. We have a significant investment in time and money in them (dozens of servers in 3 datacenters) and don't regret it.
The SimpleCDN issue involved three parties: SimpleCDN, 100TB (aka UK2), and SoftLayer. We've only heard from SimpleCDN and they threatened to sue the other two, so the silence is not surprising. In any case, my opinion of SoftLayer didn't change as a result.
I didn't know about FileVo. I just read up on their situation and curiously, it's another issue involving UK2 (in this case their MidPhase brand) and SoftLayer.
Both the SimpleCDN and FileVo shutdowns do look bad. But I'm not relying on courage, I'm relying on experience. Over four years I personally have had hundreds of phone, email, and forum interactions with SoftLayer at every level from their CEO to first level support. And countless DMCA requests. If I believed based on those experiences I was at risk hosting my company and my livelihood there, you better believe I would beat a path to the door.
From what I understand of FileVo, they were running a file upload service, not retaining any identifying information on uploaders, and not taking any steps to prevent copyrighted files from being uploaded. Softlayer's decision to terminate their hosting was no different from what any other hosting company would do (and, in fact, what they would be legally required to do!).
> Anybody care to comment on why SoftLayer is so predominant?
My guesses are: (a) they provide dedicated servers that are comparable to Rackspace but at a lower cost (but with a support trade-off), (b) they also offer cloud computing and storage instances that are decent (in my experience).
I'm not affiliated with the company in anyway, but I'm a big fan of http://iwantmyname.com/ for domain registration. Super quick and easy especially if you're using Heroku or GAE.
It's depressing how little GoDaddy has innovated and how dominant it still is.
It is but I value my time more than the one dollar difference between GoDaddy and namecheap... I don't want to spend time navigating through all the bunch of upsell crap from GoDaddy and then pulling my hair dealing with their awful dns settings...
I'd like to move my email away from Google Apps, for various reasons, but they have the best spam filter by far. It's worth sticking with them just for that.
I'd love to see that too, but it's not something you can easily identify just by querying their web server. This list was compiled using the domain-profiler tool:
Oh, a bit of a side note on hosting for startups. I know many people want to save costs by centralizing hosting, but as a word of advice keep your database, mail, and web servers separated. By not doing so you've created a single point of failure. Not only that, but it makes securing things appropriately more difficult (ie. you are unable to create only web server specific firewall rules for the server).
A good trick we've been using while building http://www.webpop.com has been to use the cheap small instances on the Rackspace cloud to build a mini version of a nice distributed setup with load balancers, web servers, database servers, monitoring, etc...
The small instances are very cheap, and we've been automating everything with chef, so it's east for us to gradually scale up by adding large instances to our cluster instead of small ones.
This means we've been able to build a scalable and secure infrastructure, that didn't cost us much more than a hundred bucks a month during development.
We've been doing the same thing on Linode, and initially did our development on Rackspace cloud. One important thing to note about Rackspace cloud is that your private network bandwidth is limited to 10mbps when you're on their small Xen instances - this may not be a big deal during development, but after you go live if you have any traction, then with simultaneous backups, sql replication, and any other chatter that might be happening between servers, it can really "slow down", and you might end up having to move to larger instances simply for the port speed, even though your existing server is sufficient in regards to CPU, RAM and disk.
Our testing ended up leading us back to Linode, since with a simple support ticket you can up your private interface to the full 100mbps. So our "combo" ended up being Linode + Amazon S3 (since for many of our items the reduced redundancy storage is sufficient, and is half the price of could files).
It's sure fun though setting up your own small "cloud" system ;)
Anyone that's self-hosting email care to explain why they're doing it? Seems like something that makes no sense to do internally until you start getting more "enterprisey".
I'm not affiliated with a YC company, but I do self-host my email. My reasons:
1. I'm a control freak and a privacy freak. I don't trust any third party with my email. I want to know how things work under the hood. And if I want to make a change, I don't want to have to depend on any third party to do it.
2. It's not hard to do. apt-get install postfix and dovecot, invest a couple of hours munging config files, and you're done.
3. Much easier to transition your data if you do get "enterprisey." All your data is on your server, so you can just tar it up and ship it anywhere.
4. You can configure the server so that insecure connections are not possible, making it that much less likely that someone will leak a password accidentally.
5. Stealth. It's much less likely that someone will try to break into my server than into Google's servers.
> Bullshit. There's troubleshooting when things go wrong, patching, maintenance, etc.
In over 10 years of hosting my own email I've never had a problem that needed troubleshooting after getting the initial installation sorted out. And patching on Debian is trivial.
> Your single server is much easier to target and break into than Google's.
"Stealth" does not mean "harder to break into", it means "less likely to attract the attention of someone with the means and motivation to break in." Google may be harder to break into, but it's a much bigger target.
My house is easier to break into than, say, Bagram air force base. That doesn't mean that I'm safer in Bagram.
Patching is never trivial. The process itself may be trivial, but you have to actually do it. That latter part requires ongoing attention, which makes it non-trivial.
less likely to attract the attention of someone with the means and motivation to break in
That depends. Most attackers go for low hanging fruit. And the fruit hardly hangs low at google with their dedicated security team.
The most juicy targets are actually those little homebrew servers that someone once setup and then mostly forgot about. The spammers can often use these servers for months before anyone (usually the ISP, not the owner) takes notice.
If your server is listening on Port 25 then it's not stealth. It's very likely being scanned while I write this comment - perhaps to see if it's an exim vulnerable to the recent remote-shell exploit (http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2131).
So, to wrap this up. I also run mailservers for various companies. I also run debian. I even also run dovecot and postfix. But I'm doing this for a living, am subscribed to the relevant security mailing lists, harden the hosts before deploying them, and I monitor them.
If you don't have a dedicated or hired admin to do all that then hosted e-mail usually has the better value proposition.
If you're new to running a mail server or linux server, then yes, lots of troubleshooting, etc... If you have someone who knows what they're doing, it's really not a big deal. I don't think I've had to spend any time on any of my mail servers in ages.
Not sure what you mean by additional storage? Local corporate e-mail might take up ~10GB per person after a few years? Most of my servers have 1+ TB of local storage + SAN. Takes a lot of e-mail to fill that up.
Spam and malware filtering are both pretty easy. yum/apt-get install clam and/or spamassissin/razor/pyzor/whatever. If you're running your own server(s) anyhow then backups, user admin, etc... are a sunk cost you've already spent.
If you're running your own servers anyhow, it's really not a big deal. I have a normal GMail account and a enterprise google apps account and both of them have pretty frequent IMAP outages (usually just for 5-15 minutes, nothing serious) whereas my mail servers haven't been down in years (minus planned server migrations). Also, if something does break, I like being able to go in and fix it, without waiting for other people.
With Google email hosting you just have to worry about a few hundred people who can read all your email, their data retention policies, and who can subpoena your private communications.
(conspiracy theory:
Google gives the public one text box on a webpage to search the Internet. Do you think they don't have a text box on an internal webpage to search all of Gmail? Do you think facebook doesn't have one internal webpage capable of searching all private communications? Facebook used to advertise "spy on your friends!" as an employment perk.)
Hate to break it to you, but that same subpoena can just as easily allow your house, office, or datacenter to be raided. Your data is just as susceptible to lawful intercept at Google as it is your private premises.
When self hosting, you can make sure that deleted email has actually been deleted. You have control over how long logs are kept. You have control over whether or not to use encrypted filesystems.
It is much easier for one over-broad subpoena or search warrant to reveal your private data if it's hosted on Google than if it's hosted on your own server. If everyone keeps their own data on their own machines, then they would need to subpoena or get a search warrant for each individual person, rather than a broad one attempting to fish for information.
Furthermore, you can fight a subpoena. Do you trust Google to fight a subpoena on your behalf? How would they even know whether or not they should; how would they be able to tell if the subpoena is reasonable or not?
Google had a rogue sysadmin that was apparently able to access user data with ease a short time ago.
It might not be as easy as a textbox to search all of Gmail but your gmail data store appears to be wide open to a fairly large number of google employees.
Indeed, however if you're running your own server(s) then firewalls/monitoring/IDS/etc... need to be part of your typical setup anyhow. I wouldn't suggest someone who doesn't admin their own servers to get a server for running mail on, but if you manage/secure/backup servers for other stuff, mail is pretty easy to do.
I self-host my mail too, because I've been doing it for years and I really like having absolute control over what ends up in my Inbox.
True, it is probably easier for someone to break into my Linode than a Google server. However I think it's probably even easier for someone to break into my Google account. The surface area of a Google account is huge nowadays..
One of the main benefits of self hosting is the MTA logs. When self hosting, you know if the message has got as far as the recipients mail server, and you know if the recipients server has attempted to deliver mail to you. You also have ultimate control over the spam filtering, which I find very important.
> 1. I'm a control freak and a privacy freak. I don't trust any third party with my email. I want to know how things work under the hood. And if I want to make a change, I don't want to have to depend on any third party to do it.
Email should be considered public. Unless you're using encryption it's sent in plaintext and could easily be stored on any server it goes through. While it may be harder for the gov to get access to it a clever hacker or employee can still get it.
> 5. Stealth. It's much less likely that someone will try to break into my server than into Google's servers.
I don't personally host my own email, but I can see it from the perspective of data control. If you use Google Apps for example, your email exists on their servers. I personally don't mind that, but others may not be so welcoming. Also if you want a more detailed email setup with regards to routing and filters, it may be difficult / costly in finding a provider.
I have to agree there is no such a need when you just started. Just go over to Google Apps and its done. Unless your service is build around or require email such as Posterous.
i've hosted my own e-mail for over 10 years and provide imap hosting to my customers. my main reason for doing it is having control over my own data, backups, and logs. my customers use it because they don't need an exchange server (my servers do caldav for calendar sharing) and don't trust google.
i do complex server-side filtering with procmail to keep my inbox clean (so all of my devices polling my mailbox will only alert me when something important comes through), automatically archive all email in an "allmail" backup folder, and do things like rewrite e-mail headers for certain conditions.
One possible reason is that Google can be a potential competitor, buyer or in an event which leaking email information to Google might jeopardize company's growth.
What many people here are looking for is a snapshot of the choices a group of smart people have made : Going to rackspace.com is a whole different choice than heading over to slicehost.com.
Makes sense. I'll do that after I'm done with the meeting I'm in now.
Edit: Changed. However, the number of companies with A records in netblocks that are owned by "Slicehost" is pretty small. Perhaps Rackspace has been working on changing the names on the Slicehost netblocks?
That's embed.ly - they're at Slicehost, but you still have them at Rackspace even after this change. Your script might be confused because the /24 is a reassigned child of Rackspace's /16.
I've parsed WHOIS in the past and the corner cases make a very solid argument for just doing it by hand. IP ownership issues, which you've already seen with Linode, make it almost exclusively a wet code problem.
There's a few nagging questions with the list from a casual skim, too, one of them being octopart.com - 64.71.142.178 is part of a reassigned /28 out of a Hurricane /18, which means Octopart likely hosts themselves. I have doubts you get a /28 from Hurricane with their shared hosting, but their sales page does list a static address (singular). Shrug.
Most of the mistakes were due to my script using Team Cymru's IP to ASN mapping service (http://www.team-cymru.org/Services/ip-to-asn.html) thanks for your tip on using ARIN's Whois service. Looks like I've got more accurate results with them.
Yeah, you'll get announcing datacenters out of that, but for IP ownership, you need to check WHOIS. ARIN WHOIS is only going to be ARIN regions (the Americas) - you want RIPE for Europe, APNIC for Asia/Australia, and so on.
I moved away from Slicehost due to frequent performance problems, which I found were related to disk thoroughput. This was at the STL data center. It was driving me nuts until I figured out it wasn't due to something going on in my own system. I had a spare Linde which was relatively trouble free, so I moved the main server to Linode and it has been so much better. Currently it has 2-3 times the activity as the server doing the same job had on slicehost with no performance problems, ever. AND it is cheaper than Slicehost.
We do it for security and privacy reasons. It matters less now, but for getting early carrier deals it was key, and now those agreements still bind us.
I use Amazon EC2 personally and would love to use it for more at Loopt, but can't.
It still isn't if you want to be using the latest and greatest. Even Amazon only offer Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. We're using the R2 editions of both.
I've been really curious about this - how do you like it? I've got a couple of Win2k8 cloud servers at Rackspace right now, but I'm entertaining other options.
I recently switched to Zerigo after years with DNSMadeEasy. I got tired of their clunky interface from 1993 and their login captcha (?!). Zerigo has a fantastic UI, quite refreshing...
I think it's very telling that something like 60% of YC companies have a SSL certificate...means they are most likely processing some financial transactions, so they charge their users directly
it's also interesting that so many are using the hurricane electric host...never even heard of them before
HE is a pretty nice colo facility and backbone; not many people use them for hosting directly, but instead for colo/dedicated servers. Other hosts using their colo facility may be listed as HE. They're also one of the more well known proponents of IPv6, offering free IPv6 tunnel brokerage services, so if you need to support IPv6 or would like an IPv6 address block, they can help you out.
what is the catch with google as email hosting? we use rackspace, it seems nobody is using rackspace for email. What is the criteria in choosing email hosting?
As for pricing:
- Godaddy DNS is free (I think?)
- DNSMadeEasy runs about $2-5/month (max of 10 million queries/month)
- Dynect SMB runs between $30-95/month depending on what you need (max of 1.8 million queries/month)