6 ms·

My domain registrar (DNSimple) tried to 5x the cost of my reseller plan

86 points by corywatilo 2y ago

justplay 2y ago
been there left the boat.
zelon88 2y ago
[flagged]
tomschwiha 2y ago
I like using OVH for domains and its quite simple to manage / order domains with their API.
- 0x073 2y ago
  I used ovh for ~8 years, but it's getting more and more unstable ( not sure if only the web UI or their structure) Domain registrations don't get through and must validate manually (no new customer and always paid invoices), especially if you buy friday and you must wait until monday) Updating DNS records sometimes don't work (random webui errors, sometimes even in french)
jabiko 2y ago
I'm wondering what prevented the author from having the sales call and seeing what rates they are willing to offer. Best case they might even be better than the current rates.
- ganoushoreilly 2y ago
  Why did the change need to happen if this is a plausible outcome? Why add the risk to an existing customer that by all metrics is already loyal? Wouldn't an email with a % price increase and explanation been more acceptable? Why the drastic change in price? It's someone trying to squeeze more revenues quickly and by doing so, damaging their brand / reputation.
  - jabiko 2y ago
    I'm not trying to defend DNSimple and their decision to not keep the legacy plan around for existing customers. Sure, that's a hostile move that seems the be designed to squeeze more revenue from their existing customer base. I'm just wondering why the author didn't at least try to explore that avenue.
  - hiatus 2y ago
    It seems like more work to write a rant and post it to hackernews than to just take a quick phone call.
    - dewey 2y ago
      Not if you are afraid of calling people.
- corywatilo 2y ago
  I'm allergic to sales calls. =] Plus, when has jumping on a "quick call with sales"[1] ever resulted in paying less money? [1] posthog.com/sales
  - atilla-45 2y ago
    [dead]
- johnklos 2y ago
  If someone says your prices will go up by a factor of five, there's very little if no chance you'll negotiate to anywhere close to the current price. Also, when someone is barely satisfied with the current offerings, something like this would be the impetus needed to do something new.
mcnichol 2y ago
[flagged]
- nathas 2y ago
  Have you looked at FolioHD? It's geared towards photographers and artistic types that want a really nice portfolio website. Paying an amount that is just-above-market-rate for a domain and not needing to understand how to configure DNS for someone non-technical seems like an absolutely worth-while reseller case.
  - mcnichol 2y ago
    If you want to be an artist then control of your intellectual property is probably a topic you care a great deal about. Your domain and how people reach you is probably the first lever. If you are giving that up happily, I assume renting without the option to own or leasing a car is a sensible business model to you and you are just experimenting without any real intention of starting. The effort and time in becoming an artist outweighs by at least two or three orders of magnitude the time it would take to read an article and setup a domain. Namecheap, GoDaddy, all these registrar's do it for you. Imagine having 900 houses and renting them out to a community of like minded folks. Whether it is at cost or slightly above, it is "rent seeking" in the sense they own, you borrow. While it isn't rented, they are squatting on it.
    - karamanolev 2y ago
      From my *personal* experience, the target audience, to a large degree, doesn't care at all about owning domains, websites or servers. They want something that just works and the less they have to deal with technology, the better. In that sense, a reasonable and ethical service where you own nothing is much better than one that preys on you and you still own nothing.
      - mcnichol 2y ago
        Domain registrar's don't prey on you. You own the domain. You can take it and they can't withhold it. The registrar is already doing what this site is doing. I don't have a problem with a site making it easy to setup. It's the site holding a thousand website domains. What you are asking for is different. If FolioHD said: Have a domain in mind that you'd like to use? Type it here and we'll do all the work setting that up. What they are actually doing is: We've bought these 900~ domains and we are holding them. Pick one you'd like and we'll set it up.
velcrovan 2y ago
I've been with DNSimple for years (personal and business accounts) and am watching closely to see whether I need to think about moving off in the next year or so. I've also started to feel like something is off … price hikes with no added benefits have me wondering if it would really be so bad to manage DNS for ≈ 30 domains at Hover or something.
- badlibrarian 2y ago
  Cloudflare handles domain registration at no price markup, the UX is solid once you figure out the slightly quirky process, and transfers have gone smoothly.
  - sebastian_z 2y ago
    Porkbun [1] is also good (I have no affiliation with them; just a happy customer). [1] https://porkbun.com/ https://porkbun.com/.
  - LtdJorge 2y ago
    My issue with the Cloudflare registrar is that if you are using Cloudflare for DNS too, you’ve basically given them control over your domain. Yes, they don’t need the DNS part to redirect your domain to a different address, but you’re putting more eggs in the same basket. If you also use their hosting (pages or workers), you’ve given them full control over the entire project. I prefer to use the latter options, without using their registrar, just in case there is a problem or misunderstanding with a site, I still have the authority over DNS in a different provider and can switch quickly.
    - velcrovan 2y ago
      The registrar has control over your domain regardless of where you host DNS, since they could change your nameservers if they felt like it (or perhaps by accident). True I doubt a company like Cloudflare would do this (there would be huge repercussions), but it's nonetheless true that your registrar does hold all your eggs no matter what other decisions you make.
selectnull 2y ago
Oh man... this is not the first time they're doing it. I've been their user and they have deprecated the plan I've signed up for. After a call with the CEO, we have come to an agreement of a custom plan that allowed my to keep one of the features I really needed (vanity name servers) at the time. That was in 2015. In 2017 I had another call with them at after that I decided to move away. 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).
physhster 2y ago
Is there any feature there that is unique enough you can't use AWS or GCP? I use GCP for all my DNS needs and it's very very cheap.
- devinparadise 2y ago
  They have a feature called ALIAS records, which is a non-standard DNS record type similar to CNAME, but it works with the root domain. The people I know using DNSimple were using it because it worked better with Heroku than other DNS providers at the time. They are not the only ones offering ALIAS records now, but it's still a non-standard feature that not every DNS provider has. A feature like this is needed for Heroku, since they do not give you IP addresses for your servers - you have to use CNAME or ALIAS records.
  - physhster 2y ago
    GCP has ALIAS records in preview as of somewhat recently: https://cloud.google.com/dns/docs/records-overview#alias-records https://cloud.google.com/dns/docs/records-overview#alias-rec...
tobinfekkes 2y ago
Hey Cory, small world! Nice to see this pop up on HN! We've never talked, but we're related :) Glad to have a family-member in this crazy tech world. Rising costs, worsening products, sorry to hear of your predicament.
superq 2y ago
EasyDNS might be a few cents more (literally) than the alternatives, but they're a smallish company and have never pulled this nonsense. (Also their customer support assist in preventing domain hijacks and recovering, which is pretty important if your domain is valuable.) 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.
- rendaw 2y ago
  I tried Porkbun after suggestions here. The symbols in my password caused a 403 error. Porkbun is terrible (although I'm not sure if there's a better other option). 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).
- mekoka 2y ago
  > Also their customer support assist in preventing domain hijacks and recovering, which is pretty important if your domain is valuable. 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?
settsu 2y ago
Some "unit elasticity" going on maybe? 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.
sgammon 2y ago
Was not aware this still existed in 2024
bww 2y ago
I recently transferred all my domains and cancelled a DNSimple account I’ve had for more than a decade for similar reasons. 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.
rootsudo 2y ago
Interesting. I know to become a registrar it is something like 70k. Didn’t think that providing an api to register a domain would be a serviceable business. Now it does.
aeden 2y ago
Founder and CEO of DNSimple here. I'd like to clarify a couple of things about our business that may shed some light on why we've ended certain legacy plans when we have. 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.
- paulddraper 2y ago
  > rising prices of infrastructure What does this refer to? (It sounds like servers, and those are certainly not getting more expensive.)
EagleStance 2y ago
I'm curious why they didn't communicate with DNSimple about the price hike. From the way this blog is written, it sounds like he didn't try to communicate with them at all, but instead chose to just walk away.
- corywatilo 2y ago
  We emailed back and forth several times. CEO was on the thread, was aware of my concerns, chose not to do anything. The result of the back-and-forth was the proposal I shared in the post.
netsharc 2y ago
My 2024 pet peeve is people exposing their illiteracy to me by using "nx" (n = a number) as a verb... "to 2x" = "to double" "to 5x" = "to quintuple". Just noticed his blog's tagline... I think terrible grammar is poor UX too. =]

86 points by corywatilo 2y ago

justplay 2y ago

been there left the boat.

zelon88 2y ago

[flagged]

tomschwiha 2y ago

I like using OVH for domains and its quite simple to manage / order domains with their API.

0x073 2y ago
I used ovh for ~8 years, but it's getting more and more unstable ( not sure if only the web UI or their structure) Domain registrations don't get through and must validate manually (no new customer and always paid invoices), especially if you buy friday and you must wait until monday) Updating DNS records sometimes don't work (random webui errors, sometimes even in french)

jabiko 2y ago

I'm wondering what prevented the author from having the sales call and seeing what rates they are willing to offer. Best case they might even be better than the current rates.

ganoushoreilly 2y ago
Why did the change need to happen if this is a plausible outcome? Why add the risk to an existing customer that by all metrics is already loyal? Wouldn't an email with a % price increase and explanation been more acceptable? Why the drastic change in price? It's someone trying to squeeze more revenues quickly and by doing so, damaging their brand / reputation.
- jabiko 2y ago
  I'm not trying to defend DNSimple and their decision to not keep the legacy plan around for existing customers. Sure, that's a hostile move that seems the be designed to squeeze more revenue from their existing customer base. I'm just wondering why the author didn't at least try to explore that avenue.
- hiatus 2y ago
  It seems like more work to write a rant and post it to hackernews than to just take a quick phone call.
  - dewey 2y ago
    Not if you are afraid of calling people.
corywatilo 2y ago
I'm allergic to sales calls. =] Plus, when has jumping on a "quick call with sales"[1] ever resulted in paying less money? [1] posthog.com/sales
- atilla-45 2y ago
  [dead]
johnklos 2y ago
If someone says your prices will go up by a factor of five, there's very little if no chance you'll negotiate to anywhere close to the current price. Also, when someone is barely satisfied with the current offerings, something like this would be the impetus needed to do something new.

mcnichol 2y ago

[flagged]

nathas 2y ago
Have you looked at FolioHD? It's geared towards photographers and artistic types that want a really nice portfolio website. Paying an amount that is just-above-market-rate for a domain and not needing to understand how to configure DNS for someone non-technical seems like an absolutely worth-while reseller case.
- mcnichol 2y ago
  If you want to be an artist then control of your intellectual property is probably a topic you care a great deal about. Your domain and how people reach you is probably the first lever. If you are giving that up happily, I assume renting without the option to own or leasing a car is a sensible business model to you and you are just experimenting without any real intention of starting. The effort and time in becoming an artist outweighs by at least two or three orders of magnitude the time it would take to read an article and setup a domain. Namecheap, GoDaddy, all these registrar's do it for you. Imagine having 900 houses and renting them out to a community of like minded folks. Whether it is at cost or slightly above, it is "rent seeking" in the sense they own, you borrow. While it isn't rented, they are squatting on it.
  - karamanolev 2y ago
    From my *personal* experience, the target audience, to a large degree, doesn't care at all about owning domains, websites or servers. They want something that just works and the less they have to deal with technology, the better. In that sense, a reasonable and ethical service where you own nothing is much better than one that preys on you and you still own nothing.
    - mcnichol 2y ago
      Domain registrar's don't prey on you. You own the domain. You can take it and they can't withhold it. The registrar is already doing what this site is doing. I don't have a problem with a site making it easy to setup. It's the site holding a thousand website domains. What you are asking for is different. If FolioHD said: Have a domain in mind that you'd like to use? Type it here and we'll do all the work setting that up. What they are actually doing is: We've bought these 900~ domains and we are holding them. Pick one you'd like and we'll set it up.

velcrovan 2y ago

I've been with DNSimple for years (personal and business accounts) and am watching closely to see whether I need to think about moving off in the next year or so. I've also started to feel like something is off … price hikes with no added benefits have me wondering if it would really be so bad to manage DNS for ≈ 30 domains at Hover or something.

badlibrarian 2y ago
Cloudflare handles domain registration at no price markup, the UX is solid once you figure out the slightly quirky process, and transfers have gone smoothly.
- sebastian_z 2y ago
  Porkbun [1] is also good (I have no affiliation with them; just a happy customer). [1] https://porkbun.com/ https://porkbun.com/.
- LtdJorge 2y ago
  My issue with the Cloudflare registrar is that if you are using Cloudflare for DNS too, you’ve basically given them control over your domain. Yes, they don’t need the DNS part to redirect your domain to a different address, but you’re putting more eggs in the same basket. If you also use their hosting (pages or workers), you’ve given them full control over the entire project. I prefer to use the latter options, without using their registrar, just in case there is a problem or misunderstanding with a site, I still have the authority over DNS in a different provider and can switch quickly.
  - velcrovan 2y ago
    The registrar has control over your domain regardless of where you host DNS, since they could change your nameservers if they felt like it (or perhaps by accident). True I doubt a company like Cloudflare would do this (there would be huge repercussions), but it's nonetheless true that your registrar does hold all your eggs no matter what other decisions you make.

selectnull 2y ago

Oh man... this is not the first time they're doing it. I've been their user and they have deprecated the plan I've signed up for. After a call with the CEO, we have come to an agreement of a custom plan that allowed my to keep one of the features I really needed (vanity name servers) at the time. That was in 2015. In 2017 I had another call with them at after that I decided to move away. 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).

physhster 2y ago

Is there any feature there that is unique enough you can't use AWS or GCP? I use GCP for all my DNS needs and it's very very cheap.

devinparadise 2y ago
They have a feature called ALIAS records, which is a non-standard DNS record type similar to CNAME, but it works with the root domain. The people I know using DNSimple were using it because it worked better with Heroku than other DNS providers at the time. They are not the only ones offering ALIAS records now, but it's still a non-standard feature that not every DNS provider has. A feature like this is needed for Heroku, since they do not give you IP addresses for your servers - you have to use CNAME or ALIAS records.
- physhster 2y ago
  GCP has ALIAS records in preview as of somewhat recently: https://cloud.google.com/dns/docs/records-overview#alias-records https://cloud.google.com/dns/docs/records-overview#alias-rec...

tobinfekkes 2y ago

Hey Cory, small world! Nice to see this pop up on HN! We've never talked, but we're related :) Glad to have a family-member in this crazy tech world. Rising costs, worsening products, sorry to hear of your predicament.

superq 2y ago

EasyDNS might be a few cents more (literally) than the alternatives, but they're a smallish company and have never pulled this nonsense. (Also their customer support assist in preventing domain hijacks and recovering, which is pretty important if your domain is valuable.) 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.

rendaw 2y ago
I tried Porkbun after suggestions here. The symbols in my password caused a 403 error. Porkbun is terrible (although I'm not sure if there's a better other option). 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).
mekoka 2y ago
> Also their customer support assist in preventing domain hijacks and recovering, which is pretty important if your domain is valuable. 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?

settsu 2y ago

Some "unit elasticity" going on maybe? 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.

sgammon 2y ago

Was not aware this still existed in 2024

bww 2y ago

I recently transferred all my domains and cancelled a DNSimple account I’ve had for more than a decade for similar reasons. 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.

rootsudo 2y ago

Interesting. I know to become a registrar it is something like 70k. Didn’t think that providing an api to register a domain would be a serviceable business. Now it does.

aeden 2y ago

Founder and CEO of DNSimple here. I'd like to clarify a couple of things about our business that may shed some light on why we've ended certain legacy plans when we have. 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.

paulddraper 2y ago
> rising prices of infrastructure What does this refer to? (It sounds like servers, and those are certainly not getting more expensive.)

EagleStance 2y ago

I'm curious why they didn't communicate with DNSimple about the price hike. From the way this blog is written, it sounds like he didn't try to communicate with them at all, but instead chose to just walk away.

corywatilo 2y ago
We emailed back and forth several times. CEO was on the thread, was aware of my concerns, chose not to do anything. The result of the back-and-forth was the proposal I shared in the post.

netsharc 2y ago

My 2024 pet peeve is people exposing their illiteracy to me by using "nx" (n = a number) as a verb... "to 2x" = "to double" "to 5x" = "to quintuple". Just noticed his blog's tagline... I think terrible grammar is poor UX too. =]