Full Transcript for Is it always DNS? with DNSimple's Anthony Eden

Speaker 1

Hi, I'm Scott Hanselman. This is another episode of Hanselman Minutes. Today I'm chatting with Anthony Eden, the creator and founder of DNSimple. Is it DNSimple or DNSSimple?

Speaker 2

It is DNSimple, although I've heard people say it in all kinds of ways, and, I'm happy to have them as customers regardless of how they say the name.

Speaker 1

I feel like when you started it, the first thing you would have done would have been, to register not just DNSimple, but also DNSSimple with the extra S and then redirect it to canonicalize your own URL.

Speaker 2

Yeah, we would have loved to have registered it from day one, but in fact, somebody else already owned it. So we went through the process years later to actually buy dnssimple.com from, somebody who sold it to us.

Speaker 1

That is actually kind of awesome. It's always DNS. It's always DNS.

Speaker 2

Always.

Speaker 1

So you've been on the web since the early, mid nineties. You've been a web person since the web began. And DNS is fundamentally at the root of everything. We joke about how it's always DNS, but it always is. And back in the day, in the early nineties, I think when I registered hanselman.com, it was hard. You'd call network solutions and you'd be, you'd have to fax people and talk to a human to get a domain name.

How did you get into the business? How did you think 14, 15 years ago that, that DNS was something that needed to be solved and that DNSimple could do it?

Speaker 2

It was pure chance. I, at the time it was 98, so late 1998, I was living in France. Kind of failing at the work that I was doing, trying to build a, CMS system for a school over there, and it wasn't really working out, and, decided to head back to the US, got back to the US and was looking for work, and I received a, somebody, a, basically a, a job offer from somebody who was looking for a Java programmer, but in order to take the job, I had to be able to help him become accredited.

This was back in '99, this was when, when the dot-com domain was de, was basically deregulated, and so he said, I, I need your help, we have five days to do this. And I said, no problem, we can do this. I had to do the technical implementation. So in five days, I built a swing application where I could run Python scripts written in Jython to control the communications and run through the test with VeriSign, because it was Network Solutions slash VeriSign already at that point, I believe.

And it was completely ridiculous. It was such an overblown solution, but we managed to actually get accredited in that very short timeline. And he's like, this is awesome. You need to stay and work for me. Come be the CTO. And this was at a company called Signature Domains. And we were one of the first seven domain registrars during the deregulation in 1999.

Speaker 1

Wow. So you ended up being the lead dev and the CTO. If you look at your LinkedIn, you've got a bunch of other things on it that... Do you... Are you stepping out of the DNS business and then back in? Yeah. Or all of these different holding companies for... Because there was Atrion LLC and different organizations. So the timeline is not clear.

Speaker 2

That's correct. So I did the domain thing for quite a while in 2000. I can't remember exactly when. I think... So we went through the bubble and the burst of the dot-com bubble and burst. I then joined another company to work on health systems, so medical device systems, then came back to the domain space. Then I left that again, went and worked in a different part of the domain space.

So I ended up going over to Hawaii and I ran the Mariana Pacific Islands top-level domain for a few years. So the registry and registrar for that, which is dot MP. So I did that for a little while. Then I went and worked for A DoD contracting company, and I worked for Yahoo for a little bit, and then, so I was all over the place. And then, and then I, I started doing my own consultancy, and that's what Atrion was.

It was just me writing software and charging people for it. worked for LivingSocial during the LivingSocial heydays, as part of the crew there, writing Ruby, writing Clojure, doing all kinds of fun things there, all the while running DNSimple. So I actually had the full-time job in the beginning working for LivingSocial while I was running DNSimple.

And then when DNSimple finally grew enough where it could sustain me, then I left that job and started working on DNSimple full-time. And that was about, I'd say 2012, 2013.

Speaker 1

Okay, so check this out. This will be a funny way to, to transition. I'm looking at an email from my wife, in June of 2011, and she has a screenshot of our credit card, and she says, there are 23 Draws, meaning debits, from these guys. Eighteen for eight dollars and fifty cents, and five for eight dollars. Who is D and Simple?

Speaker 2

That just shows you how long you were... We... I launched D and Simple in July of 2010, after having worked on it for three months. So the first line of code was written April 1st, 2010, and it was launched mid to late July 2010, and you were already on it. And getting billed repeatedly by 2011. That's pretty cool.

Speaker 1

Yeah. So my, that, that means that I was probably, I don't know, not single digit customers, but first, definitely the first couple of hundred people I was right there, because it was simple.

Speaker 2

Yes.

Speaker 1

and this is not a, you know, we, I don't do sponsored shows. It's not a sponsored show, but I've known you now, you know, as a fan of yours on the internet for 15 years.

I had tried to use, I think we were all anti-GoDaddy at the point. We were. Like, there were a bot, there were just a lot of really crap places. To keep your domains. And it was incredibly tedious to simply add a record. And as we started moving towards the cloud years later, you want to add a text record, you want to add a URL redirector, every one was complicated except Dan Simple.

And that's why I was like, oh, I'm in. And I remember like the moving everything over and the, the collaborating and the consolidating. And I'm looking at my account now and I have like 46. Forty-one registered domains in forty-seven zones. I, I got down from fifty, because keep in mind that every domain that I've registered with you is a startup idea that I failed to, to ship.

So there's also that. You are a, a living monument to my own failure as a startup founder.

Speaker 2

Well, I'm also a living monument to my own failure as well for other types of startups, because I've got, I think, 150 domains in my account. Anyone at any

Speaker 1

point could be a thing.

Speaker 2

It could be, it could be huge. I've got, and then, of course, you have variants of that one name, because just having the dot com isn't enough. So, yeah, it's kind of funny. It's people collect domains, and it's the graveyard of ideas, right? Like, that is totally what happens to many of us, especially creative types, software developers, or designers, or, or entrepreneurial types.

It's just, you build up this portfolio of domains, which, funny enough, is the reason that the very first business that I worked for, that I stopped working for him, because he left the registrar business, because he had a domain portfolio. Of like 30,000 domains, and he, and he said, focused on his domain portfolio rather than running a registrar.

Speaker 1

Oh my goodness. you know, I, I, I wonder, I've got a bunch of domains, I have this one, I have a bunch of vanity domains that are like redirects to stuff, like I have a YouTube channel called Computer Stuff They Didn't Teach You, and people would, keep telling me that I, I, I didn't really register it there, and it turns out I have Computer Stuff They Didn't Teach You, with two Ts, didn't, and teach, and I also have the misspelling one with the single T.

Speaker 2

Right.

Speaker 1

I, I wonder sometimes if people over-index on the misspellings and they think that it's going to be important to have every single variant. I wonder if like Microsoft has 20 different versions of.

Speaker 2

Oh, undoubtedly. Just in

Speaker 1

case somebody types it wrong.

Speaker 2

Undoubtedly. I, I'd be surprised if Microsoft didn't own Microsoft where the Os were zeros.

Speaker 1

Oh, yeah, and there's the whole,

Speaker 2

and then the UTM code, the UTM versions of it,

Speaker 1

Turkish eyes, Cyrillic, yeah, every possible version, there's someone in charge of that. That seems like a big problem with DNS in general.

Speaker 2

Well, I mean, when you think about it, it's, it's, the, the DNS system was designed in a time, a, a gentler time, when people weren't so worried about other people doing bad things other than his jokes, right? I mean, we're talking about a protocol that was developed in the 80s, and the internet was, the web still was just a, a, a gleam in someone's eye, right? That wasn't even going to be a thing yet.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, he, he probably did, he may have been thinking about it then, but I'm not even sure. And

it has withstood the test of time, but not without the pains along the way. and all kind, and not just from the, the, the types of attacks we're talking about where they have letter variations, but also the operational side of it, DNS has long been a vector of, of DDoS attack because everybody has to have it. It's a protocol that has to be underlying pretty much everything.

So it's one of those protocols that gets attacked pretty regularly in all kinds of different fun ways.

Speaker 1

I, I was thinking about, Microsoft, who I work for Microsoft in my day job, so for disclosure, recently is starting to change all of their cloud stuff to dot Microsoft. They have dot Microsoft as a TLD, which is crazy, a top-level domain. and they, they are saying that, that's more secure. So like, whatever dot cloud dot Microsoft or cloud dot Microsoft.

Why, why is that the case? Why do they believe that? Why is dot com not fine for everyone? Why do we need a dot ninja and a dot Microsoft?

Speaker 2

Well, I think dot Microsoft, for the obvious brand reasons, is quite interesting, but I think from the security perspective, they believe that they can run the name and control the registry, and essentially for them, that means there's one less point that somebody can attack. That is out of their control, because they, they can't control the .com namespace.

If somebody were to find a vector to attack it, or any other one, .net, whatever it might be, they would be down just like everybody else, but at least in the case of .microsoft, they have more control over it, so that's probably why they're saying it's more secure. They also might be able to put rules in place starting at that Top-level domain requirements, for example, they did this, I think it was .app, so Google did this with .app and .dev, they basically turned on the HTS, I think it's HSTS or?

Speaker 1

HSTS.

Speaker 2

Yeah, they turned that on by default and required everything to have, to have secure connections. So that's an example of when owning the, the TLD gives you the ability to implement things you couldn't otherwise.

Speaker 1

Yeah, HSTS, HTTP strict transport security, it's like a redirect before, like once it's happened once, they don't even redirect you. At the, at the client level, you can't HTTP your way anywhere anymore. That is a secure place from now on. It's a huge hassle when you're doing local host development and you get, you know, redirected over to an HSTS.

Yeah, so they've, they've switched that to, to . . . . Microsoft. You all have .com, .orgs, you can, I have some .ios and some .cos.

Speaker 2

Yep.

Speaker 1

I'm looking here at my . Domains, and I'm thinking about,

could I lose them? Could they be attacked? You know how people can steal your, your SIM cards. We hear about people swapping a, a, a, a, a phone number out from underneath someone. When I register with you or with someone else, how do I know that that's going to be mine and that it can't be stolen? Because like, Hanselman.com is my whole family, all my cousins and everyone's email going back 20 years.

Speaker 2

Yeah. So, so let's think about the ways, I mean, SIM swapping, funny you should bring that up, is one of the attack vectors for getting around two-factor auth with SMS.

That is the reason why we don't offer two-factor auth with SMS, while we offer instead with hardware keys or with, the one-time passwords, right? Because we're trying to make it so, one, we give you the tools to protect yourself, and that's the starting point. The other thing is, is that you have to be with companies that you trust are not going to be socially engineered.

Social engineering is probably the number one way that a lot of these takeover attacks occur. Granted, there are other unique and fun ways which we've seen recently that come out, but truthfully, if I'm going on a one-off, if somebody were to attack one-off and they wanted your domain particularly, most likely they'd try to social engineer their way into it to prove, to try to prove their you.

And so I think that being with companies that have pretty strict policies against taking action on your behalf is a good starting point for ensuring that your stuff remains safe. It's also just paying attention to it, making sure that it's being renewed, ideally automatically, every year, and potentially, if it really matters, renewing it for multiple years, right? That's something that you could do as well.

So there's a lot of ways to protect it. It really comes down to, one, personal security, and two, trust in the security of the entity that you're buying and managing your domains through.

Speaker 1

When you, when you created this, there were a number of, like, there are still a number of, like, small boutique DNS companies that are well-known. What makes those boutique entities that are not, you know, Google domains or GoDaddy, like, competitive? For, for DNSimple, like, you had an API, you had a very thoughtful UI, like, it was really easy for it.

I felt like it was a developer's.

Speaker 2

It was, yes. You got it. That's exactly what it was for. and I think that for some of the other ones, price is going to be something that's competitive. Look, a lot of people still undervalue the, the importance of their domains. you'll see it time and time again. They, they, they'll go through a shady registrar or a company that's not really innovating at all.

The domain then gets lost because they can't even access it. They, you know, the person who manages it goes away. And they're with a company where one person had access because that service didn't offer the ability for multiple people to have Access, that's pretty common. And so I think people get attracted by low prices or things like that, or legacy.

They're just like, I've always bought my thing, my domain through this company. I will continue buying it through this company, right? So legacy has a big part of it as well. I kind of think you have to keep evolving and keep looking and seeing who out there is actually continuing to make progress on the protection and the operations of domains and DNS.

And a lot of the small ones won't. They're pretty happy where they're at, and that's okay. They're going to move really slowly. The big ones will initially, but then they also will, they have a lot of different business models, right? So one of the things we tried to do is get in that sweet spot, right there in the middle where we could continue innovating, but at the same time, we weren't Spreading out and trying to do lots of different things and, and thus running out of resources to stay focused on domains in DNS, which any company that, so DNSimple has always been funded by bootstrapping, so we've never taken outside funds.

And a company like that has the opportunity to do what we've done, which is stay the course and focus on one thing and do that one thing well. Whereas if you're VC funded, you, and you grow or you become, you know, you go to public trading, like the, the expectation is you will continue to grow and you can only do that by adding on more products.

And so that's where we see sort of that separation.

Speaker 1

Yeah, if I look at some, and I won't say their names, but if I look some, some obvious cheaper domain type places, now it's hosting an email and work marketing tools and security, and it's like they don't do just DNS. And, but then at the same time, you, you make the point that people are kind of devaluing DNS, and they're like, I just want to park this thing for a dollar.

Speaker 2

Yeah. And they,

Speaker 1

they don't, right, they just, like, just, just hold, just hold onto this for me, and I'll give you a buck. and that kind of devalues what's going on behind the scenes. There seem, if you look at the, the blog.dnsimple.com, your team is very technical, and they're always following the way that the industry is moving for whether it be null MX records or whatever, that are making, you know, DNS more, more secure and more safe.

I, I hate to see people in this race towards the cost bottom.

Speaker 2

It's, the word that we hear is, it's a commodity. That's how they think of it. They see DNS as a commodity, which is, is interesting. It's not been helped by the big players commoditizing it. That's fine, but that's fair. We can play that game too. We just have to figure out a way to stay lean so that we can play that game at the same time and yet continue innovating and doing things that, but again, if we stay focused, we can do that.

It's, it's through focus that we're able to innovate, and it's not necessarily by being the biggest or the fastest growing company. It's more about being the most focused company.

Speaker 1

Hey friends, in the interest of me learning more about AI and helping you learn more about AI, for the next couple of episodes, we're going to have Leander Van Dorn from Qualcomm help me understand AI. What is an NPU and why is it important today?

Speaker 3

so the NPU stands for, Neural Processing Unit, and it's basically your AI accelerator. And so it can execute AI operations, these large language models or

all sorts of different generative AI models in a much more efficient way than a CPU or a GPU can. So just to give you an example with Microsoft's recall, like you run that continuously in the background, running it on an NPU takes about 30 minutes of overall life, battery lifetime. If you were to run it on a GPU, it would take six and a half hours.

Right, so it's all about energy efficiency, very specifically dedicated to a single task, which is AI.

Speaker 1

Very cool. So I'm going to go learn more about NPUs and how they can do things more cheaply from a battery perspective, more efficiently, and why I might want a Snapdragon processor in my next PC.

Speaker 3

Exactly. Thank you.

Speaker 1

And folks can check out more at qualcomm.com slash developer, to download those things and learn more today.

Now, you've got this thing called the domain control plane, and maybe I'm conflating these things and you can explain it to me, but when I go to the dashboard, it says 41 registered domains, but then next to it, it says 47 DNS zones. Does that mean that I don't have all of my domains with you, or am I conflating those two things?

Speaker 2

It might be that you have a domain registered somewhere else and pointing at us. It might be that that, you have a name in there that's not even registered and never was. It's possible. the domain control plane, the idea behind it really was that We, we'd love it if everybody used DNSimple all the time, but that's not a reality. The reality is some people are going to mix DNSimple with Route 53 or Azure DNS or different providers, maybe even on-premise DNS like Core DNS.

And so what we did with the domain control plane was build a way to connect into those other systems. So from within DNSimple, I can connect to Azure's DNS, and I can actually manage in a bi-directional fashion zones that are at Azure or at DNSimple side by side, and I can move them back and forth. And so that, the idea was an acceptance that a multi-platform world is the reality.

Like we are in a multi-cloud world. That is the way it works. and we'd rather Adopt a system or create a system that allows us to work in that space rather than trying to force people because we're too small to force people to do anything. That's the reality of it, right?

Speaker 1

So,

Speaker 2

so let's just make it so that it's easy. And we, our goal is always to make DNS and domain management easier. So if somebody can do all that through the UI or the API, then simple, and they have that single interface, that's pretty powerful, we think. So this is kind of the, this is early, it's still nascent. We created it, within the last year and a half, and we've been testing it out, but it, it still has a long way to go, I think.

But that's the principle behind it.

Speaker 1

Now, you've got a really great website called HowDNS.Works.

Speaker 2

So I would

Speaker 1

encourage folks to check that out. I think that it is a, a, one of the little gems of the internet that people should spend some time on. It's, the little website that, that could. HowDNS.Works. But in the interest of maybe understanding a little bit more about DNS, I think that the average developer gets the idea that they go to a registrar and they register a domain, and then their home network, they may be put in 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8, and they've got these, you know, very simple, IPv4s that they've memorized.

Can you explain the relationship between me putting in 1.1.1 or whatever, and what you're doing, and how Google or CloudFlare and my own network interact, and when they eventually show up at DNS Simple and how that interaction works?

Speaker 2

Sure, sure. So we do the authoritative DNS side of it. So that is, we hold the zone information for a domain that's with us, and ultimately the answer to the questions lies with us. But those questions first go through a series of other servers. The 1.1.1 or 8.8.8, And there are several of these that have been run over the years, are resolving networks.

So they're resolvers. the resolvers are essentially the first place that you go to ask the question closer to you, because the idea is if we cache a bunch of these requests closer to you, then you don't have to go back every time to the authoritative name server to ask that same question. There's also an onboard cache on pretty much every computer that is also great, but the time that it, the, that it will hold that response is shorter and shorter as the closer it gets to you.

So the farther away it gets to you, the, the, the longer it might hold that response in memory. so the idea is, is that you make a request, and, and how DNS dot works is a great way to see all this in the comic version of it, but you make a request, that goes to the resolver, say, an 8.8.8.8 or a 1.1.1.1, that resolver in turn starts trying to figure out where is this domain? Does it have something in cache that it can start the answer? So, and if it doesn't, it would have to go say, first, let's pull this apart.

I'm going to go to the root name servers, and it's like, do you have, say, scotthanselman.com?

Speaker 1

And

Speaker 2

the root name server says, no, but I have dot, I can tell you who has dot com. So then that gets delegated to the dot-com name servers, which are run by a whole bunch of companies. Then the resolver says, hey, dot-com name servers, do you have scotthansomlin.com? And it says, no, but I can tell you who does have scotthansomlin.com. Then it might go to our name servers, and our name servers finally say, yes, we do.

And it responds back, the resolver then caches that information that it's gathered along the way, returns it to you, and then you ask again, and it's like, here, I already know. Don't need to go again. So that's one of the performance enhancements that makes DNS continue to scale even as the internet just grows and grows and grows, and we have more and more traffic.

Speaker 1

Now, this might sound like I'm a fanboy, but certainly I've been a customer for a very, very long time, so I am indirectly a fanboy. But in the early days, 10, 15 years ago, one of the reasons that I stuck with DNSimple was I would constantly have to make a C name or a subdomain change or add a text record, and I would watch people like live coding on Twitch or live coding on YouTube try to put a website up live on stage, and they would update a C, you know, a C name and GoDaddy or something.

And then they'd go, well, we're going to wait about 12 to 15 minutes for the DNS to propagate, and the demo would never work. You know what I mean? But for some reason on DNSimple, I would go and make, you know, exampleapp.hanselman.com, and I'd hit refresh, or even now when I do a, a let's encrypt certificate, and I add a text record, and then I go back to let's encrypt at the command line, and it says, oh, I see it.

Is that some herbs and spices that you're doing? Because you always seem to be fast. On picking that stuff up while I'm not constantly waiting for, for other domain providers to, to, I don't know, clear the caches, do whatever they need to do.

Speaker 2

Yeah, that's part of, that's part of what's, I think, what works well at Dinsemble and what makes that piece work really well is that we, instead of using def, the, the protocols that you have in the DNS space to synchronize between different servers, we use our own internal system, and that internal system has been built up over the years to be pretty fast.

And essentially, the goal is how fast can we get changes to our edge? Because our network's not just one server or one set of servers in one location. Our authoritative network ha- right now we have eight points of presence around the world. So we have to get that data out to all of them. The furthest one, which is kind of our, our Bar that we set for has to go to Australia, and it has to go from our data, our primary data center in the US over to Australia.

So we've worked hard to make that caching mechanism really fa- like that transfer mechanism work really fast. And I think we all, one of the things that we also did is that we took a lot of time to measure that and constantly measure it and make sure that it was continuing to work. There were times where it didn't, it worked up to a point, and you know how it is with scaling, right? You start scaling something, it works to a point, and then it kind of just starts to slow down and bog down, and it doesn't work as well.

You need to do some redesigns. We've gone through several of those over the years to redesign our infrastructure and our architecture for how we move data around. so yeah, that's, that's part of what we do. I think it's also our willingness to set default TTL values that are fairly low. A lot of original, like if you go to, let's say you go to your registrar, they might default you to a TTL of a day.

Right, and if some, if a cat, we talked about those caching name servers, the TTL is the time to live. So if that caching name server has that and it has a very long time to live, it's not going to clear itself. It's going to like let that thing run down and you're going to get that old record if you're doing an update. So yeah, there's a few little things that we did that we set up and then there's a few big things that we did over the years to make it work fast and all that work together and make it so you can do that type of thing and, and you can know that the record's going to be deployed real fast.

Speaker 1

Yeah. Yeah. As a customer who is constantly tweaking, making changes, adding text records, messing around, particularly in development, I can, I can attest to the fact that, I don't like that thing where I, make a change to my code, I, I push it into Git, I wait for my CICD. Those are all very fast. All of this happens fast. And then I go to my DNS and I update a record and I sit around, like, I don't have that experience with DNSimple.

And I've always appreciated it because when I said at the beginning, it was a developer's DNS, that feels like that. I've constantly seen people, with other domain registrars wait and fight and hit refresh and IP config slash flush and reboot their, just anything they could do to get whatever's stuck, unstuck. which brings me to my next question.

I, as a web developer, feel like at, you know, when you think about the layer, the seven layers of networks, I understand HTTP. I could write, I could, I used to, true story, I used to telnet to port 80 and simulate HTTP gets to show people how you can browse the web at port 80 as a way of showing students in my, in my university classes when I was a professor, how to drive stick shift.

I can't do that at the DNS level, but I guess, I bet you probably could like do a Wireshark and you know DNS at that level. You know what I mean? Like the way I know HTTP, you know DNS.

Speaker 2

yeah, I mean the, I, Like you, I also used to tell Net to port 80 on HTTP servers to show how it worked. That kind of

Speaker 1

nerd.

Speaker 2

The good old days. I also have written three DNS servers. I wrote one in Perl, I wrote one in Java, and I wrote one in Erlang, which is what we currently operate. So I wrote the core of what our name server infrastructure run-ons. Granted, other developers have added their Their energy to it as well. But I spend a lot of time trying to understand the protocol really deeply.

And that's the cool thing about it. Like that's, to me, it's, it's always been fascinating because the protocol itself is massive, but it's, it's broken up in all these little chunks because it's, it's evolved over time. So you can pick a piece out of that and read an RFC, which is out there in the public, and you can understand how that little bit of the protocol works.

granted, there are some pieces of the protocol that are not so easy to understand, but the, the fundamental protocol is just so elegant and beautiful. I think, again, that that's a, it's a testament to why it has survived for so long is that it is so elegant at its core. And so I've always been fascinated by it. I've done a lot of talks over the years on, on UDP and, and for DNS and, and even things specific about how Erlang is really good at Taking packets and breaking them apart into their little bits.

It's because it has a particular part of the language, which are called, bit strings, which are perfect for mapping DNS packets. It's like they were made to go together, peanut butter and jelly. so yeah, I, I, I love it and I've spent a lot of time doing that and a lot of time writing tools that query DNS and try to understand what's going on.

And yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's, I mean, I'm a nerd at heart. I'm, I, even though I run the company now, I still love, I wish I could be writing code more often is what it, is what it comes down to. Alas,

Speaker 1

there are more

Speaker 2

important things for me to do.

Speaker 1

The, yeah, I think, I'm not sure if WhatsApp still runs on Erlang, but early on they were on Erlang and, it seems to be a great backend, language and environment for doing, doing stuff as fast as possible at scale, chopping bits up and getting them out. You know, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Speaker 2

I mean, it was designed for, for telephone switches, right? So it was defined, designed to work in an environment that needed to be, reliable, but also could break. So the, the whole principle behind it is like, allow it to fail fast and then recover well. And that's actually part of what The Nsimples infrastructure is designed as well. Rather than trying for this, you know, this massive, redundancy, granted we have plenty of redundancy, but if a system fails, it's designed to go down hard and then come back up well and clean.

And, and Erlang as a language, and more specifically OTP as a framework, was designed to do that. And, and like because of where it was running, because it was running in telephone switches, and you didn't have the opportunity to go out there and like try to go fix something. They needed to come down and then restart clean.

Speaker 1

Yeah, yeah. That term Erlang was a unit of telecommunications traffic, so it makes sense that it would be great at doing something like, like DNS. And then OT, Erlang slash OTP, what does the OTP stand for, do you know?

Speaker 2

So I always thought it was Open Telecom Protocol, or, something like that, but I actually, somebody told me the other day that I was just flat out wrong, and now I'm going to have to go look up on my own again.

Speaker 1

Cause they say it's open telecom platform, but like... Yes,

Speaker 2

somebody said the other day that that wasn't the case. So now I'm wondering if there's, if I've been bamboozled or if there is a deeper story here. I think it's

Speaker 1

one of those things like, you know, where it meant something once and now it's, or it's become bigger than it is. And now Erlang is certainly not just for telecom systems, although it's ironic that it's doing both DNS in this case and then WhatsApp as well. It's perfect for that kind of, that kind of work.

Speaker 2

Yeah, we, it's, it is really neat. It's, so I've written in lots of different languages. I've written in everything from Java to Python to Ruby to Perl to PHP to like just all over the board, Go, Rust, Clojure. My favorite language still is Erlang because it's not like anything else. It's, it's pattern matching in the language itself is so beautiful.

It's just, and granted it's based on Prolog. So I'm, I'm, I'd have never written a line of Prolog in my life, but I probably should go back and check because I bet that Prolog is, can be, is just as beautiful for certain things.

Speaker 1

So let me ask you this last question, and, I mean it as a hundred percent of a compliment, although some people might not think about it that way, but I've always thought of DN Simple as the best kind of boutique tech company. You've been running it now for fifteen plus years, you've been thinking about this stuff for twenty years, but I've never seen you try to get acquired or become bigger than necessary.

A boutique is like we make high quality, bespoke leather goods out of a nice little place in Florida, and, you know, you come, come and visit us and you'll meet like some little old tailor, you're the, you're the old tailor in this, in this case, you're the guy with the, you're the guy with the, the, the measuring tape around his neck who wants to go and measure your inseam and make sure you get the perfect bespoke suit.

is that the, the, the, the, the future? Is that the plan? Or is there some get bought by giant billionaire company and then you go off to an island somewhere?

Speaker 2

I, for the foreseeable future, am totally happy to keep running the InSimple as it is. I like running it as a boutique service. I like knowing the people that use our service. I really, truly like meeting customers. I go out and I will meet a person, and that person says, I use the InSimple and it makes me happy. And that is a joy for me.

You know, is there a price? Sure, there's always a price, right? But I'm in no hurry. I'm still, I consider myself a young man. I'm still under fifty here. I've got a lot of years ahead of me.

Speaker 1

As I am now fifty, you have just painted me an incredibly old man. Ouch, sorry.

Speaker 2

Not, not incredibly old. You're just, you're just towing over the line. No, I, I love what I do, and I'd be happy to keep doing this for quite a long time. I, as long as we can continue to

Make our customers happy, do things that are innovative, and continue to operate it the way we, we want to operate it, I am totally happy continuing to do this. I, I love this business. It's so fascinating, and, and look, it's got 40 years of history, and so that gives you a lot of room to play in and a lot of space to learn in, and, and to me, that's a fun thing.

Speaker 1

Very cool. Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today. again, not a sponsored show, just talking to my buddy, Anthony, but I do recommend personally, and I have for years, you can find my tweets going back 15 years, DN Simple, whether it be one domain or 100,000 domains, also fantastic, SSL certificate management now makes it super, super easy to not have to think about your domains.

Thanks for, for chatting with me today. I appreciate it.

Speaker 2

Thanks for having me on, Scott. I appreciate it as well.

Speaker 1

We've been talking with Anthony Eden, founder of DN Simple, and this has been another episode of Hansel Minutes, and we'll see you again next week.