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Back to Anthony Eden, Founder and CEO of DNSimple, with Anthony Eden.

How Did Anthony Eden's Script Become DNSimple's Name Server?

DNSimple customers could not put a CNAME on the apex of a domain such as dnsimple.com. A Heroku customer wanted the naked domain to point at a Heroku site. The alias record started as a Perl script running inside PowerDNS, with a MySQL backend, and it worked until growth made it stop scaling.

Lua and another attempt did not fit. Anthony Eden learned Erlang to solve the scaling problem, using a library that already parsed packets, and built the name server DNSimple still runs in production. The language was learned to fix that problem inside DNSimple, not to start the company.

Transcript

Anthony Eden, Founder and CEO of DNSimple ·

Geek at Sea

More from this episode

  1. How Did Geek at Sea Introduce Anthony Eden?Anthony Eden is the founder of DNSimple.
  2. How Did GoDaddy Push Anthony Eden to Start a Registrar?GoDaddy was holding a personal domain in 2010, and the domain name system screen was horrible.
  3. How Did Anthony Eden's Living Social Nights Start Paying?The opening stretch was independent contracting, about a year and a half of software work to pay the bills. Living Social came next.
  4. How Did DNSimple Keep Its Developer Niche?The niche was engineers and developers building web apps. They wanted to set domain records and leave, without hosting and without an email provider bundled in.
  5. Why Does DNSimple Take Bank Transfers on Only One Plan?On the show, DNSimple changed billing so larger customers could pay by ACH. A credit card was the only payment option in the early days.
  6. Why Did a Hawaii Mentor Want Five Bucks Per Dollar?A mentor in Hawaii gave the rule early on: do not raise money unless one dollar can turn into five.

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