Smash Notes
Making DNSimple (Changelog Interviews #637)
Anthony Eden, Founder & CEO of DNSimple, joins the show to talk about the world of managed hosting for DNS and more.
Notes
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On the show, domain registration at DNSimple is now mostly equal to operational DNS. The speaker always wanted to be a DNS company first and treated the registrar as an afterthought, because the registrar business has no margins and is cutthroat. Customers kept pushing for DNSimple to be a registrar.
Over the last couple of years the team put more time into making the registrar component a first-class citizen. The speaker now splits DNSimple almost evenly between the registrar and operational DNS, with little slivers left for the certificate side and email forwarding. Most registrars open on a text field, suggest alternatives when a name is unavailable, and then run the registration flow. DNSimple flipped the order. A customer has to have an account first, has to put a credit card on file, and only then can register as many domains as they want.
The host says that for as long as the show has been a customer, the show has never registered a domain through DNSimple.
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The hard part of suggesting domain names is not coming up with words to string together and suggest. The hard part is determining whether the names are available. Most registries set really strict limits on how many times a query can ask whether a name is available, and in some cases the limits are absurdly small.
Some registries let you open two synchronous connections, and that is it. Everything being done has to fit through two. The connections are stateful, not stateless. A new version of the protocol that registrars use to connect to registries is being developed around REST and stateless transfer through the entire packet, so a long-lived connection does not have to stay open. Keeping a long-lived connection open does not scale to the level people need to operate at.
On the show, the speaker has a feeling that search will be a lot easier to add once the new protocol starts getting deployed at some of the registries and registrars. The suggestion part is not what makes the search hard. The checking part is really hard.
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On the show, the domain business is lopsided. Innovation happens at the edges, at the registrars, and the money gets sent to the core, at the registries. The money goes to the wrong place, and the speaker thinks that is one reason the industry continues to see stagnation.
Becoming a technical registry operator means meeting stringent requirements with ICANN for permission, then convincing top-level domain holders to switch. The registry operators own the rights to a top-level domain, so an operator has to prove stability and stay involved at the policy level and the technology level. The work sits deeper at the core. The people operating the registries get attacked most often, constantly every day, all day, because taking them down can take a large swath of the internet, and some people just want to watch the world burn.
The jest that the money goes to the wrong place gives way to the reason the money goes where it goes. Registry operators carry the responsibility to keep the internet operating, and the buck stops with them on a top-level domain. Even smaller top-level domains would affect a lot of people. Running the dot com top-level domain is fundamental to how the world works, and taking it down takes it all down. The speaker says none of the work is possible without it and leaves open whether everything would stop.
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